A Moment of National Insanity
Dear Deborah,
Lucky for you that you were able to join the protests in Madison. I will be there, coincidentally, on March 8, for a long-ago-booked lecture at the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences. By the way, I met your son Nick when I spoke at Monterey, Calif., last week, and he is the spitting image of his mother!
I'm beginning to think we are living in a moment of national insanity. On the one hand, we hear pious exhortations about education reform, endlessly uttered by our leaders in high political office, corporate suites, foundations, and the media. President Obama says we have to "out-educate" the rest of the world to "win the future."
Yet the reality on the ground suggests that the corporate reform movement—embraced by so many of those same leaders, including the president—will set American education back, by how many years or decades is anyone's guess. Sometimes I think we are hurtling back a century or more, to the age of the Robber Barons and