OTTAWA — Ottawa High School principal Rick Johnson laments that in the pressure of getting good grades or passing standardized tests, students, parents and taxpayers forget the whole idea behind public education. The heritage of American public education is that everyone has the opportunity to be an informed citizen, he said. “We get so busy with grades and needing to be the top and having all As, we skip over the learning at times and becoming an informed citizen becomes a rarer thing.” Students should be more concerned about the journey and the joy of learning, and less about the journey’s end, Johnson said.
Thursday, Sept. 29, 9 a.m.
