I got a call from my little sister last week. She told me that she’d been assigned her… I got a call from my little sister last week. She told me that she’d been assigned her first-ever research paper. I responded with some predictably jaded remark to the effect that she’d be stuck doing them for years. “Welcome to hell, little sister.” Thankfully, my 10-year-old sister was too excited to catch the cynicism in my voice.

That’s right. She was excited about writing her first-ever research paper. She was more than a little offended when I later named her, aptly enough I’d say, a bit of a nerd for being thrilled about it.

Her plans to be the first person to completely explain the Bermuda Triangle aside, she was excited about the idea of the project. She was into the research. She was ready to outline. She was willing to write. Whether all that will remain true when it’s actually time to do the work remains to be seen.

I’d forgotten that it was possible for anyone to react with joy to a research paper being announced. Often my response is irritated acceptance of the inevitable. Occasionally I’ve reacted with disdain, confident that my night-before effort would require virtually no effort at all, but I can’t remember reacting with excitement to any such assignment in years, and I’ve had a far better education than most get in America.

Apparently, we don’t teach kids how to read anymore. We don’t teach them math. Science is approaching sorcery in the minds of the commonly uneducated. Computers are treated like Olympian gods. Hey, at least everyone’s got a diploma.

What more could we want for our citizens than a piece of paper certifying knowledge gained and representing four years spent ignored and belittled? I work with a woman who didn’t know what “affirmative” meant. I had to define it for her. She later mentioned that she was an honor student at her high school.

Our birthright is the combined output of every generation that’s come before us. I usually make that statement in respect to art or philosophy. It’s just as true for any academic subject, with the definite exception of home economics. The majority of the population must not be ignorant to America’s political history and the basic functions of its current government.

That ignorance allows for casual manipulation. It allows politics to be nothing more than a game. Whoever can project the most effective image to the most people wins. While to some extent that will remain true regardless of the average level of education, I’d much rather have the game include politicians explaining their policies in terms of their historical precedent, philosophical basis, practical implementation and, of course, their relationship to the candidate’s sexual history.

Education is more than just an artistic right and a political necessity. Once Wal-Mart is staffed by robots, bathrooms become self-cleaning, movies come in the mail, a child’s first toy can be bought online, photos get developed at home and factories disappear from American soil, the job market will change a bit. Suddenly mop wielding or the ability to hand someone change with seven-inch fingernails will no longer be able to support a family of two. What then?

Paying teachers more, improving facilities, providing textbooks – these things would all have a substantial impact, and they require only money. Money! It seems that it’s quite a trick to find money for the school systems. If we figure out where all the money we’ve spent to wage our war on terror came from, we’d probably be in a much better position to finance education. Even if schools had enough money, the problems would be far from over.

Both my middle school and high school were far from poor, and I did have some phenomenal teachers, but the public school system is not in any way designed to protect curiosity. The average kid probably isn’t as exited about the Bermuda Triangle or “Animal Planet” as is my little sister, but there’s always something every child looks at with awe with wonder with the deeply human need to understand.

When years are spent forcing children to learn how to problem-solve, they unlearn how to stare at mystery. They forget that they once needed to figure out where the moon goes during the day, how trains move, why everything’s so weird in a mirror or where fire comes from and where it goes. If our schools could protect that, we wouldn’t need to choose between missiles and murals.

E-mail Zak Sharif at [email protected] and let him know what childhood question you never got a good answer to.