We don't need you any more. (News And Notes).

Pressures for conformity in the classroom would appear to be the strongest since the 1950s. The impetus comes not from zealots using the horrors of 9/11/01 as their cover. Rather, the rationale is poor student performance on standardized tests. (It seems to make no difference that young people--or humans--aren't standardized or that those who make these decisions are not elected, policed, or certified. Or that the doomcriers cannot even prove a case for deteriorating standards: see Sam Wineburg's wonderful Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001], vii-viii, 31-32). In the past the glory of American education had been its ability to nurture individualism, both on the part of the teacher and the student who emerges from the school system. These days test scores found to be "below expectations"--like the February second groundhog, the Delphic Oracle of examination results emerges periodically to make a doleful pronouncement on the matter--or "below average"--with never a word about what that average should be or a defense of the content of or teaching method implicit in the test--suffice to tar teachers, school administrators, and students with failure's black mark. With this lever, control of education--primary and secondary today, coming soon in higher education--has passed from teachers, parents, school boards, states, and even the U. S. government, to the Pashas of Princeton and elsewhere who determine what everyone should know and, by extension, how they should know it.

Is it all bad? No. But we must not lose sight of the good: an education steeped in ...