[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 9, 2006]

When my daughter was in seventh grade I asked her what she wanted to do for her science-fair project.  I always thought that science-fair projects were both dreadful and positive.  I had done plenty of them when I was in grade school and much later became a judge for competitive regional high-school fairs where serious scholarship money was at stake.  My daughter's older brother had participated in the middle-school fair when he had been her age.  Participation was not mandatory, nor was there any formal competition: In keeping with modern liberal education theory, everyone got the same blue ribbon for his project regardless of quality.  Still, participating in a science fair with a properly developed and supervised project was a good way to reinforce lessons in the scientific method, which is an essential tool for logical thinking.  Or so I thought.

To my dismay, my daughter informed me that the middle school had discontinued the science fair.  The professional educators in our public school system, which is ranked tops in the state, had determined that the educational value of science fairs was no longer all that great.  The reasoning behind this determination, my daughter said, was based on two things, namely that kids think science is boring and that their parents do all the work anyway.

Before I got wound up on another one of my what-is-the-world-coming-to tirades, my daughter was quick to add that the faculty had come up with a "better idea" that was more relevant to the educational needs of our precious future leaders of America and would give them practice in something far more useful than the scientific method.  That something was the PowerPoint presentation.

Apparently, statistics show that most American schoolchildren would rather become communicators than scientists or engineers.  Being a professional communicator, like Katie Couric, Britney Spears, or a typical schoolteacher, seems to most kids like easy work without a lot of math involved.  And even if they went into business or politics, expressing one's ideas in the universal language of PowerPoint was essential to conveying one's thoughts to the other side of the bargaining table.

The school did pay lip service to science by limiting the PowerPoint presentations to particular scientific subjects.  Apparently, it is more useful to be able to "dialog" about scientists than it is to actually know how to do science, so the task was this:  "Prepare two PowerPoint presentations about the life of a scientist and an engineer on the list below, explaining what their contributions were to his or her field."   Apparently it's not what you know, it's whom you know:  Knowing scientific principals is better than knowing scientific (or grammatical) principles.

In the old days, this would be an English assignment to write a short biography, but with PowerPoint one can make a dull subject dance with text movement, pictures and sound.

Well, my daughter looked over the official list of scientists and engineers and decided to ask the teacher whether she could choose two subjects who were not on the approved list but who stimulated her interest because she had already learned something about them on her own.

For the scientist, she picked black-hole cosmologist Steven Hawking. For the engineer, she picked iconic architect Frank Lloyd Wright, since engineering is the better part of architecture.  The teacher had not heard of either of these two people, but after a quick Google search approved my daughter's request anyway.

Because my daughter is a talented artist in her own right, her PowerPoint presentations were aesthetically pleasing.  The thing that made me feel best about the education she was getting, however, was her conclusion, which tied both presentations together and said just about everything that needed to be said about this experiment in science fair evolution:

"The achievements of these two men in their respective fields were substantial and significant, but not as great as they could have been if they had known PowerPoint."

In my day, such sarcasm would have invited a D or even an F, but my daughter got an A on both her presentations.  Unfortunately, so did every other kid.