This morning, Elizabeth Edwards spoke with a bunch of bloggers at St. Anselm College in Manchester, NH. I’ve just gotten back to Connecticut after driving up for the event. I hope to write a detailed report of the event later. However, she spent a bit of time answering a question that I asked her and I want to focus on that in particular.

I read a lot of blogs, especially those beyond the progressive political blogosphere. One great community of bloggers are the homeschooling bloggers. Various news reports that I’ve read of the Edwards campaign say that Elizabeth is homeschooling her two youngest children on the campaign trail. I wanted to hear what she had to say about it and what she and John were learning about education, should he become president.

My regular readers will know that I am an Edwards supporter. While my question wasn’t planted, it was a softball question that I hoped she would be able to hit out of the park. She did an even better job than I had hoped for.

She started off by talking about how in the fourth grade, students in North Carolina study their state history. She took her kids out to Roanoke Island where they camped and woke up to the sort of morning the early settlers would have faced. Now, when they think about the early settlers, they can visualize what it might have been like. They call draw on their own experiences. It was her first comment of many that emphasized an important theme, taking away the walls of the school and expanded the student’s world. It has changed the way they think about learning.

She went on to speak about traipsing through the woods with her children, gathering leaves, making moulds of animal footprints, and even observing the decomposition of a dead beaver. She spoke about categorizing the information gathered, and returned to the idea of real life questions you don’t get in school and getting kids to experience learning beyond the confines of the traditional schools.

She acknowledged that the Edwards family was well off and could provide these sorts of experiences for their children and talked about the need for public schools to do more to provide these sorts of experiences. She noted that you don’t really have to travel far for such experiences, they can be found in your own backyard. As I listened to Elizabeth, I thought of many great teachers I had met who had done exactly this.

She talked about visiting a model of the solar system in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, where Pluto, which was still considered a planet when the model was built, was a mile away from the school, and really helped illustrate the scope and scale of the solar system.

She talked about seeing more of America than just Disney World, or even the standard stops like the Freedom Trail in Boston and Washington DC. She spoke about seeing the great variety of American landscapes and the great diversity of American communities.

Few of us will ever get a chance to provide the great educational opportunities that Elizabeth and John are providing for their children. They are approaching it in a well thought out manner, one that all of us who are so concerned about education should be paying attention to with a focus on getting their children to recognize that learning can take place beyond the boundaries of a school and with the aid of materials beyond just books.

In later comments, she addressed the question of No Child Left Behind and noted that probably every woman in the room understood that “one size fits all” just doesn’t work. The comment received the laughter it deserved, but it also illustrated one of the many fundamental flaws with No Child Left Behind. Not only is “one size fits all” the wrong way to assess how a school is doing, it is also the wrong way to try and fix things in a school that is under performing.

Elizabeth spoke about the importance of Federal funding for school building projects. Yet she also recognizes the walls that programs like No Child Left Behind put between children and their education. She recognizes the wall that too many of us put up, compartmentalizing education to something that happens only in a classroom. She recognizes the value getting people to appreciate the diversity that makes our country great. In many ways, it seemed like what she was saying to Margaret Spellings, to the defenders and implementers of Bush’s failed educational policies, and to everyone who limits the education in our public schools, “Tear down these walls.”

Personal Note
No blog entry about a campaign event would be complete without Fiona getting in on the action, so here is a picture of Kim and Fiona with Elizabeth Edwards.

(Cross-posted at Daily Kos)