yes i can, why can't i ?
Ironically it would not surprise me if as a result of less Statist brainwashing the actual performance of the United States children on international tests goes up.
Why this wouldn't surprise me, is because I don't have any faith what so ever in the education system, because it seems to me that it is counter-active to the formation of a well-formed human mind.
The more I learn the more I believe that this continues to be the case.
For instance just last week I read a book regarding the functioning of the human mind that addressed the fact that our memories are not formed in such a fashion as a computer writes data, but we recognize patterns, or streams of input, and our mind is great and predicting future occurances based on the comparison of the present (like some one talking) with what we have experienced.
Such as that when given the words.
"Cat, Hat, Rat, Mat, Sat," we might logically expect and predict that the next word would be Chat, Fat, Bat, or any other word that matches the pattern established by the original set.
Thus, when school forces students to memorize facts by rout it is forcing them to absorb knowledge in a way that the human mind is not intended to, and breaking the natural tendency to learn by analyzing patterns.
This would also explain why those that read a lot of books appear to have higher intelligence, or higher aptitude. It's not so much that they actually have higher intelligence (which at best is only viable when discussing the potential to advance of the very young) but that they have a database of more pattents that they can filter current events through to predict where it is going, or to construct their own patterns from.
Such as the text of this entire reply. I didn't actually read anything that put what I read in this kind of format, but based on the patterns of the other things that I have read when I attempted to express the various issues that I wanted to mention it formed this pattern.
Going further, I would be willing to claim that Languages that have a good collection of helper words (adjectives, adverbs, articles) are also going to foster intelligence by generating a wider range of patterns that can be played with and manipulated by the human mind, this allows for multiple streams to be generated, examined, re-ordered and then re-examined by the mind multiple times.
Ultimately it would seem that perhaps the best thing the schools could do is increase the quantity of reading done by students, and decrease the quantity of rout memorization, because the reading would allow for more patterns to be utilized in the recall of information, and more patterns would mean that recalling information would be easier, and the pupils would also be able to use simple patterns to combine disparate pieces of information with, that they might have not connected when they were initially presented with the data, but can connect once it is possible to weave it into another pattern that they can form.
.. i jst love to b smoking something 
