Water should be the focus of public education rather than testing and technology.

That's right. Water. Not because the grand idea of public education is a sinking ship-which on its current course it is-but because the human body, especially the brain, is about 75 percent water. Thus, it becomes imperative to remember the properties of water. One of the most important of those properties is that it will take the path of least resistance to the lowest point, which is exactly what most students will do if allowed.

In our ongoing attempts to quantify and qualify education we have not only allowed students to succumb to the tendencies of the water that comprises them, but we have also encouraged this sad descent.

For decades schools have been accused of "dumbing down" their curricula, and as a teacher who has weathered more than three of those decades in high school classrooms I cannot honestly deny that accusation. I will deny, however, that most of the teachers I have known have been willing participants in the downward spiral. In fact, most teachers have resisted the whirlpool that threatens to sink American education.

An educated populace comes at a huge monetary cost, and taxpayers understandably want visual verification that their investment in children is well spent, expecting typical business models to work as a means of reporting results. But public education is not a typical business that can remove faulty widgets from the assembly line or deny services to customers who lack the potential to pay. And it seems no one but those who are inside classrooms realizes this. The public wants to see results now and has no patience for such nebulous long-term evidence as fulfilled futures or enriched lives. So educators, confused about how to please the public, try to ride the current instead of standing strong against it.

If the problem stopped right there teachers might still be optimistic about what can be done with the 25 percent of the brain that isn't water. But it doesn't stop there because mixing business models with human water hides a nefarious undercurrent. Testing and technology that on the surface look like life preservers are actually lead weights, for hidden in the depths of this mix is good old greed. The potential income for private businesses from public funds invested in testing and technology has been recognized and exploited by corporate giants like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch who, as successful capitalists, have capitalized on our schools.

If technology were simply a tool as originally designed, it would not only help teachers deal with distributing and processing the tests the public demands, but also would provide ways of delivering lessons good for the brain. But at its very core, technology offers a hard-to-resist shortcut to relieve humans of a good deal of thinking by doing the thinking for them. Thus, by allowing brains that are still forming to take the path of least resistance it actually weakens brains while making billionaires out of the innovators of such shortcuts.

Testing and technology have been marketed so successfully, in fact, that teachers receive almost daily emails touting master's degrees from colleges no one has ever heard of, degrees that can be completed "fully on-line" by teachers hungry to increase their status and thus their income. Imagine that. A master's degree in a field where adults must interact with real flesh-and-bone (and water) humans that can be achieved without ever leaving the keyboard! And for a price far less than it would cost to actually attend classes taught face-to-face, heart-to-heart, and brain-to-brain. Fully on-line special education degrees are even offered to those who will be in close physical contact with students, but their fingers will only need to touch the proper plastic keys to be qualified to touch their students.

Along the way to this low point both the federal and state governments have been contributors to education's foundering, rarely asking or taking the advice of those who spend their lives trying to educate other people's children, choosing instead to please and appease big businesses that buy influence either directly through lobbying or through philanthropy that always seems to have hidden costs that surface in the classroom. And isn't it a telling sign that in the middle of the Silicon Valley a Waldorf school that refuses to use technology has become a nationally publicized success story because the CEOs and the upper echelon of big technology corporations send their kids there? That's right, the guys who manufacture these electronic drugs won't allow their kids to go to the schools that are addicted to them, while right here in Idaho our State Superintendent of Public Education has achieved that powerful position with an on-line degree in weights and measures and is pushing hard and with success to require on-line courses in our public schools. It is no surprise, of course, that some of his biggest campaign contributors were computer companies.

It is also no surprise that veteran teachers leave the profession feeling like they are abandoning a sinking ship. I know these people, and most of them are extremely skilled with technology and understand what a valuable teaching tool it can be-if used as a tool and not as a shortcut to a high school diploma. These people keep trying to push the water in their students uphill against the top-down, watered-down (literally), high-stakes, non-critical thinking tests that are used more for political and administrative purposes than for real educational advancement. These people also persist against the persistent tide of technology that promises an easy solution to the complicated process of strengthening brains so that they do not follow their own water to the lowest point. How much longer these teachers can persist in trying to pump uphill the cascade of human water depends on how much the public, a larger body of water, values the education system that once was considered vital to democracy.

Mike Ruskovich is a Blanchard resident.