No Child Left Behind, so slower for everyone

I've been thinking a lot about education lately, for whatever reason. I recently stumbled upon an interesting discussion at Plastic.com about the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). So if making standardized tests, which pretty much by default seem to be dumbed down to multiple guess questions to make it "fair to everyone," is the way to go, we seem to have problems. Surely there is a way to protect students and make sure that they are learning what they need to know to grow and achieve a higher level of education without mandating it by the government which simply seems to lower expectations of what the students can do. And allowing teachers more options as to how they teach the material, and to a large extent, what they teach. What use is an art class, or a music class, or for that matter an ancient history class? Not much if you're simply preparing the students to get a job after they finish high school and go on to a college that follows the same general procedure of education. But we're not trying to create worker bee's. We need to strive to create artists, musicians, historians. Afterall, it was the ability of man to create more food than he needed that gave rise to these interests in the first place. We need scientists for science's sake, artists for arts sake, historians for history's sake. Most importantly, we need for all of our sakes.

So I don't really know where I'm going with this ramble. Just that they system is broken, and we need to, and we can find a way to fix it. So that's what I'll try to do, but it's going to be a very slow process. I'm going to come back to it, but I'm tired and I just ran out of steam. choo choo.