Will the budget ax fall on kids' creativity?

I love that Apple Chairman Steve Jobs said that one of the most important classes he took at Reed College in Oregon, from which he dropped out in 1972, was calligraphy.

In his 2005 Stanford University commencement address, Jobs said, “Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this …

“None of this,” Jobs continued, “had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

Translation: Without beautiful fonts, the Macintosh probably wouldn’t have sold like wildfire; Apple, which began in Jobs’s parents’ garage, wouldn’t have become one of the world’s richest companies, valued at more than $300 billion in June 2011; and Jobs wouldn’t have become the cultural icon that he is today, revered with religious-like zeal around the globe since his death at age 56 from pancreatic cancer last October.

Back when Jobs was in college, who ever would have imagined the Chinese storming Apple stores to snatch up the latest iPhone?

To me, Jobs’s experience at Reed College represented what’s right about the American education system. No, I don’t believe he should have dropped out. I don’t believe any student should drop out.

But his experience at Reed allowed him to study what fascinated him. And that ability, that freedom, to pursue what you love is what, in large part, is special about our education system, and what makes America the world’s market leader.

For decades, in any number of international studies, we have compared our schools with those of other nations. On math and science tests, our children have consistently come up short when compared with kids in other countries –– at all grade levels.