Dear George,
How dost thou bless me? Let me count the ways. Thy blessings are more numerous than the germs in a glob of snot; thy aura is more powerful than the methane afterglow of a well-placed fart; your light shines like a body engulfed in a napalm fireball. Your strut palpitates my hormones; your voice floats on the rank miasma of death’s contagion.
Forgive me! When my thoughts turn to you, my soul takes flight on the broken wings of poetry.
Still, your grasp of the big picture is that of a blind visionary. When you look into the future, you see a nation of patriotic drones who worship and admire you as I do. They see in you a plainspoken, every day kind of guy of modest talents standing like a colossus against the tide of dark terror that would engulf our fair shores.
However, to produce drones, you’ve got to raise them, and this is where your “No Child Left Behind” came in. Its passage was a major coup that nobody noticed, you corporatized education by quantifying a process that is unquantifiable—learning. You did so by redefining the test.
The traditional purpose of a test was to give a teacher feed back on how well the students understood a given lesson or unit of instruction. If a teacher gives a lesson in adding single digit numbers and most of the class fails a test on that subject, then the teacher knows she must try a different approach. If only a handful score poorly, she knows who need additional help.
With a stroke of your pen, you have completed the corruption of testing. The test is now a measure of productivity, which determines how much aid a school will get. This has reformed the entire educational process. Traditional education involved two steps. Step one involved the learning of specific data or a specific skill. The second step was the more important of the two. This was the time of quiet reflection when the child synthesized new knowledge with old. This was largely a reflective process, and it was here that intelligence was formed. This deeper process took place in silence and was a life-long process as ideas were added or discarded and new conclusions reached. Because of its depth, it was more troublesome to society for gave rise to the intellect that led to that great destabilizer of the status quo, critical thinking.
By making the test a measure of productivity, you have reduced the secondary process to a vestigial remnant that will soon wither and die away. You have made a truth of the fallacy that there is a correlation between intellect and the amount of data memorized.
The ultimate goal of “No Child Left Behind” is the creation of a two-tier educational system. The top tier will produce our techoncrati, and the bottom tier will produce our proles.
The function of the top tier is to pack children’s brains full of unsynthesized bits of data. The key here is to teach the child to memorize, not to think. This emphasis on memorization will be reinforced as more and more time is spend learning test-taking skills. The end product will be the pliant technocrat who clings to a linear thought-line even if it leads the nation to the brink of destruction.
Of course, the big threat with these children is that they begin to synthesize the data that has been tamped into them like tobacco into the bowl of a pipe. However, this requires a lot of quiet time spent staring into space. Fortunately, this danger is neutralized by over scheduling the child’s day with a plethora of activities such as Little League, soccer leagues, and a score of activities that will look good on his college application. Should the child find himself with some spare time, there is always the allure of the video game. In this way, the child never grows up to be an embarrassment to his parents by learning how to think.
“No Child Left Behind” also guarantees the proper educating of the proles. Since there test-taking skills tend to suck, it’s likely that their schools will see a substantial reduction in aid. But, that’s okay because all prole needs is enough education to earn a minimum wage.
I see it now, George! Within a generation, America will be a nation of happy citizens with nary an original thought in their heads. It will be the donning of a new age, and you will be its Messiah.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
8:59:09 PM 
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