[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 7322]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




           ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) is recognized 
for 5 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, today is Earth Day. I chose to commemorate 
Earth Day by introducing the Academic Excellence and Environmental 
Sciences Act. My bill seeks to encourage academic rigor in scientific 
education by beginning at the lower grades through the study of the 
environmental sciences and the use of hands-on recycling.
  This, of course, is the year of the reauthorization of the Elementary 
and Secondary Education Act, and I hope that my bill will be included 
in the act. I have two goals here. The first comes from what I 
understand to be the difficulty of imparting and explaining scientific 
ideas and concepts, some of them fairly abstract, to elementary 
schoolchildren.
  As a result of this difficulty, in the elementary grades, children 
are often relegated to ``play science.'' This ``play science'' not only 
does not prepare them for science; it turns them off of science.
  Secondly, I believe that hands-on recycling will help children learn 
at an early age habits that conserve our resources at the same time 
that it will help concretize their interest in science and their 
understanding of science. By the time many youngsters are exposed to 
science in high schools, large numbers of them have lost interest or 
are simply unready for the rigors that are necessary to become 
proficient.
  We are suffering from starting too late to interest children in 
science. We are suffering because of the reduced pool of scientists and 
scientific experts.
  Increasingly, many of our seats in colleges and universities are 
filled by young people from abroad, coming here to study science 
because we have the best science in the world. Part of the impetus for 
my bill comes from my experience in recruiting my own D.C. youngsters 
to the military academies.
  I am pressing my own school system, the D.C. public schools, to begin 
science and math at earlier years so that children retain their 
interest in science and get prepared for the rigors of the military 
academies.
  Although the major emphasis of my bill is scientific education for 
young children, I also hope to encourage recycling approaches. I 
believe that recycling techniques involving children--saving papers and 
crushing cans and talking about where these materials come from and why 
they degrade, etc.--will help concretize the underlying scientific 
ideas.
  I also think children are the best messengers for recycling and for 
the environment. They are the real environmentalists in this society. 
If we want scientists, we had better get them before they get turned 
off and we had better learn that we must not begin in junior high 
school; we should begin much earlier than that or else they are off to 
computer games or cable or other interests.
  We must begin at the beginning. The beginning is at the lower grade 
level. We must start there if we mean to groom scientists. We cannot 
start grooming when they already have other interests. We want it 
started young, as well, because these young people can help us conserve 
our own resources by learning about recycling early and teaching us how 
to do it and why it is so necessary.

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