Read This Stunning Critique of Utilitarianism and Creative Destruction as Education Theories
Commonweal has published Reform of the Reform, a stunning critique of today’s dangerous, bipartisan conventional wisdom about public education. It is, specifically, a review of Diane Ravitch’s new book, Reign of Error, but it is much more than a simple book review.
The writer, Jackson Lears, the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University and editor in chief of the Raritan Quarterly Review, explores the danger of the business-school theory of creative destruction when it is applied to the institutions that form children and anchor our communities. He critiques, “the broader cultural attitudes that got us in this mess: the superstitious reverence for high-tech entrepreneurship, the techno-determinism that assumes we must allow technology to shape our future for us, the market-utilitarian indifference to anything that can’t be valued in dollars.”
“At bottom,” writes Lears, “the reformers’ aim is uncreative destruction: the hollowing out of