Whether straining to Leave No Child Behind or Race to the Top, there's no question that this country's leadership is zeroing in on education from kindergarten through college. Most specifically, they're working on the academic gap between the haves and have-nots domestically and on the gap between the United States and other affluent countries.

The Obama administration's new blueprint for overhauling the way our nation educates children is blessedly less focused on just reading and math and more inclusive of art, science and social studies.

There's no question that the overriding concern of the new policy -- getting every state to adopt "college- and career-ready academic standards" -- reflects the White House's belief that higher education is a fundamental driver of future economic stability for this country.

That couldn't be more true, and this renewed commitment is nothing short of wonderful. But still, the former teacher in me laments, why in all this talk of training good teachers and closing student achievement gaps do I rarely hear discussion about learning for learning's sake?

What's constantly missing in this conversation is how to capitalize on the joy of learning, the celebration of a child's (and a teacher's) innate intellectual curiosity, of personal edification.

Actual learning has been replaced by an emphasis on "achievement."

If you had visited a teacher training program in the late '90s, you would have heard conversations about educational philosophies based completely on the goal of harnessing all of the above to create lifelong learners.

But by the time I stood at the front of my own classroom and was finishing up my master's in education in the early 2000s, it seemed the overriding educational goal of policymakers, administrators and not a few teachers was to create lifelong achievers. And not necessarily high achievers mind you, but kids who could sit quietly and do well enough on standardized tests to achieve adequate yearly progress.

With that hurdle jumped, the second burning goal was to get kids through high school and in and out of college for the sole purpose of moving them on to gainful employment.

Nothing wrong with that -- we all gotta eat, and I happen to love work way more than the next guy. But this does not nurture educated masses who value learning so much that they do it for a lifetime and pass it on to their own children; it creates a nation of lifelong earners, not learners.

That's weird to me. I don't think of higher education as just job training.

Let's look at the mission statements of my alma maters.

Roosevelt University, which trained me as a teacher, says it is "dedicated to the enlightenment of the human spirit." Its aim is to prepare "diverse graduates for responsible citizenship in a global society."

Southern Illinois University, where I was an undergraduate, says that it "supports intellectual exploration at advanced levels in traditional disciplines and in numerous specialized research undertakings" to "help solve social, economic, educational, scientific, and technological problems, and thereby to improve the well-being of" basically, the world.

Those are the kinds of aspirations that will create new jobs in the future. They'll be created by innovative thinkers and entrepreneurs who can conceive new businesses, products and services the whole world will be dying to get from the United States This innovative class will do it not only because they want to get rich, but because creating something new using what you've learned -- and learning something new in the process -- is ridiculous fun.

Applause to the White House for putting education at center stage. Now if they truly want U.S. schools from kindergarten through grad school to make it in that race to the top, they need to keep their eyes on the prize:

A love of learning, not just earning.