Cause

and 

                    Effect                

       The effect of putting white boards in classrooms is the creation of an aesthetic laboratory which is devoted to deadening the effects of learning into a scientific process in an unappealing characterless environment.

    The cause of this sickening occurrence is the need to perform better as a result of the No Child Left Behind program supported by your president. The administration has decided to create classrooms that will allow children to better focus. HOWEVER, this is not the way this works. People learn better in an environment in which they are comfortable. The white boards do nothing for this, instead they create a pressured system in which the child has enhanced feelings of stress.

The sterilization of our school does not end here though. Recently we wasted a large sum of money to buy black chairs for our commons. They rid the room of the former red chairs which supplied a small bit of character. Now it feels as though one has acquiesced to these new ways of learning; we make no demands and do not question the authority nor reason behind actions like these.

Although this is an effect, it is also a cause, as is usually the result in the great wheel in which our lives spin. The effect of this may result in better scores in math and science, but at what cost? The downsizing of English departments and others, formerly devoted to alternative learning, not structured thought, are going to be restructured to create workers, and not thinkers.

We shall see if the student body rises up in protest as is the American way, or if they will sit, mute and deaf, to this slow mollification of our free thinking.