Is Our Children Learning? Childrens Do Learn.

[Doug]

NEW YORK, Sept. 26 -- As a candidate, George W. Bush once asked, "Is our children learning?"

Now he has an answer.

"Childrens do learn," he said Wednesday.

The setting was, yes, an education event where the president was taking credit for rising test scores and promoting congressional renewal of his signature education law. To create the right image, the White House summoned the city's chancellor of schools, a principal, some teachers and about 20 eager students from P.S. 76.

The visual worked fine. The oral? Not so much. For Bush, it was a classic malapropism, the sort of verbal miscue that occasionally bedevils him in public speaking and provides critics and the media easy fodder for ridicule. Subject-verb agreement actually is taught at Andover, Yale and Harvard, the president's alma maters, but in an unforgiving job that requires him to speak hundreds of thousands of words with cameras rolling, the tongue sometimes veers off in mysterious ways -- and someone always seems to notice.


...At Wednesday's event, Bush was pointing to the test results when he stumbled. "As yesterday's positive report card shows," he said, "childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured." Bush pushed on without pausing to correct himself, but the official White House transcript released later cleaned up the sentence for him by making it "children."

See the complete article here.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Children learn lots of things. NCLB most stellar success has been in teaching children the virtue of cheating.