What I Learned in 2010
Dear Deborah,
As 2010 draws to a close, I must tell you that this was probably the most amazing and wonderful year of my life. I spent the previous three years writing a book, and I had no idea how it would turn out. One never knows, do one (to quote the eminent jazz philosopher Fats Waller, and to note also that Billie Holiday sang the grammatically correct "One Never Knows, Does One")? But I digress.
When I finished the book in 2009, my agent sent it to every major trade publisher; 15 of them turned it down. They said it had no audience. They said I had to either write a policy book (which they would not publish) or a personal memoir (which they would not publish), but it couldn't be a mixture of the two. So, I eventually had the good fortune to land at Basic Books, which had published my very first book (The Great School Wars) in 1974; the new book appeared in March of this year, and it reached The New York Times bestseller list. He who laughs last, etc.
So, I have spent this year on a thrilling, grueling, exciting lecture tour. At first, I was invited to talk about the book, but after a couple of months, I no longer even mentioned the book. Instead I was talking about the present dangerous effort to distort the purposes of education, to hand vast numbers of public schools over to private corporations, and to treat children as data points to
