Scout Up a Gem of a Dill Sauce, Would You?

To Kill a Mockingbird; Harper Lee; Literary Fiction; +8; Jerry Stratton at FireBlade

It really is the school system in this book that gets me. I don't think it's gotten much better. The big problem, I think, is fear; the teachers are afraid they aren't good enough, so they can't allow their students to be intelligent. If anything, as our bureaucracies have become more and more invasive and standardized testing more and more important, as teacher's freedoms in the classroom have become more and more curtailed, the level of fear of incompetency and the unwillingness to let students follow their own intellectual instincts have only grown. It always makes me think about "No Child Left Behind," that piece of lovely brilliance designed to give us a definitive and positive answer to that immortal question: "is our children learning?"