I spent the summer before coming to Elon working in a large corporation. I spent hours each day in front of a computer in a cubicle in a room without windows putting together an internal corporate Web site.

It was a cushy job: the breakroom was full of snacks, I had a comfortable office chair and I was making a lot of money.



I tried it again the following summer at the same company. Again I was in a cubicle, and this time I was making more money and could even look out the window.

But I only lasted a couple of weeks before I quit. I had realized something. I was engaged in work that I had no ownership of. I was wholly disconnected from what I was working on. I didn’t care whether it succeeded or failed because its success or failure had nothing to do with my community or me. It was not something I was passionate about; it was a paycheck. What meaningless, soulless work!



Sam Gendell rightly observes in his piece that “Standardized tests are gateways to a corporate mindset.” This is quite true. Standardized tests, for those who remember them, were never fun. They were the antithesis of fun.

It is very analogous to the corporate world – no fun. This is not coming from someone who is bitter because of having difficulty with standardized tests [but who can blame those who do] or the corporate world, I was exceptionally good at taking tests and doing my job.



I wonder why we continue to engage the world in a way that is ultimately unfulfilling and not fun. Why is economic success and comfort the measure for how well we’re living? Is it that noble a goal to aspire to be a cog in a machine working for economic comfort and hopefully some time on the golf course when one’s old enough to retire? Why are we not doing the work that we are passionate about?



But getting back to this idea of education. The No Child Left Behind Act is endemic of our way of educating. We usher children through school to train them as good workers in the corporate world. We shape those dangerously curious kids into obedient specimens ready to forego fun and passion for soulless work in a corporation [what would a soulful work look like?]

The No Child Left Behind Act is not the root of the problem, for that lies in the very principles on which education is modeled in this country and around the world, but it is fulfillment of that terrible model. And indeed when all is said and done with our education system, there truly is “No Child Left.”

Student: Evan Webb ’08 - 10/10/07