Dropping Knowledge on No Child Left Behind

Maybe it's not immediately apparent to us high above the rest of the country in our ivory bubble here, but there's a growing opinion that Bush's No Child Left Behind Act has really helped America's school-age kids only by lowering standards and basing curricula around a series of examination hoops to jump through.

This recent survey seems to confirm the belief- according to that liberal rag the New York Times, American teenagers are not only less literate than ever, fewer than half of the ones surveyed knew when the Civil War was fought or when Columbus landed in America, demonstrating a "stunning ignorance" of history and literature, and firmly indicting No Child Left Behind as a failure suggesting that the education system leaves something to be desired:

...a research group in Washington that has studied the law estimated that based on its own survey, 62 percent of school systems had added an average of three hours of math or reading instruction a week at the expense of time for social studies, art and other subjects.

The Bush administration and some business and civil rights groups warn against weakening the law, saying students need reading and math skills to succeed in other subjects.

A recipe for success, especially in this economy! How do you compare to the majority of America's ignorant teens?

Talkin' AIDS with Kids!

If your parents were like mine and neglected to ever give you a straight up facts of life talk, your sex education probably consisted mostly of 7th grade health class, "special episodes" of your favorite shows in which someone gets molested by a creepy neighbor, and/or a lot of furtive time online. But chances are, no matter how open-minded and liberal your parents were, they didn't go into much more detail than what euphemism goes into what other euphemism to produce the magic that is you until you were at least in imminent danger of going all pubescent on them.

In the new documentary "Please Talk to Kids About AIDS", the adorable kindergarten-age daughters of two filmmakers tag along with their parents to the 2006 International AIDS Conference in Toronto, where they were filmed interviewing top AIDS experts, gay activists, condom distributors, drag performers, and sex toy salespeople, resulting in a lot of awkwardness and interesting connotations about how much explicit information kids can safely handle. Apparently the girls took most of it in stride:

Sevilla did say she was scared twice — once by an African guerrilla theater skit showing a village massacre and an orphaned girl forced into a sugar-daddy relationship, once by learning what a sex worker did. “I know it’s a job,” she said, “but it’s a weird job.”

From the mouths of babes! You can watch the entire 26-minute documentary here for free.