Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?

Our oldest son, Logan is just finishing fifth grade. Fifth grade has been an amazing learning experience. I feel like he has learned more this year than he has in any other single year of school. I of course understand that vitally important stuff has been taught to him each year he has been in school, but this year he has really learned a ton, particularly about U.S. history (and Shakespeare's works). He has memorized all of the states and their capitals, he has learned about the Revolutionary War, about Westward Expansion and the Oregon Trail, he studied about life in the Colonial Days, did reports on a president (John Quincy Adams) and a state (Oregon), memorized the preamble to The Constitution, and they have just finished learning about the Civil War. As a matter of fact, Logan is currently pacing around the living room working on memorizing The Gettysburg Address. He's making me dizzy, but considering the fact that he has always been a kinesthetic learner, I'm not about to tell him to sit down.

I have never been required to memorize the Gettysburg Address, nor had a I ever read it all the way through, prior to Logan bringing it home. When I read it, it really struck a chord within me and the words were quite powerful. I don't want to get too deep and philosophical, but if you haven't ever read Lincolns' Gettysburg Address I thought you might find it worth your while (it's short):

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.