Some thoughts (Score 1)

I realize this has been said before, but I think it deserves reiterating. The youth of America need heroes in the academic world to look up to. Instead of the often disgustingly overblown and overrated stars of pop culture, let's make achievers in math and science the people whom our children look up to. The sense that what one learns in the classroom is useless is probably one of the main reasons kids aren't motivated to learn. If they saw firsthand what academic excellence and intellectual ability can provide in the future, I think a lot of the supposed apathy of American students could be resolved. Also, as a musician in my spare time, I would dearly love to see music and the arts in general in the classroom. Learning to play an instrument can change one's life (it changed mine), by opening up an entire world of language and expression. Not to mention the obvious ties that the arts have in other fields, such as history and literature. Ironically, by emphasizing music in the classroom, it would be interesting to see a waning of interest in a large proportion of commercial music, simply because of an improvement in the musical literacy of the nation's youth.