Time’s How to Bring our Schools Out of the 20th Century article referred to a “high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries, business leaders and a former Governor,” aka The New Commission on Skills for the American Workforce, who released “a blueprint for rethinking American education.” This is not a document that inspires giddy optimism for me. I agree that schools need rethinking, but this isn’t the grassroots movement that Will Richardson envisions.

“Without these changes, the Commission said, the American standard of living will be in serious jeopardy.”

Wait! It’s dejas vu all over again. Calling on James Herndon, from 20 years ago:

Hold it, citizens! Before we collapse into terror and do something we wouldn’t otherwise dream of doing, let’s remember that we have been to school and therefore are not in the grasp of ignorance or superstition. We’ll examine the pendulum, as Poe did, and get out of this.

At the poles of the pendulum are words, written as if on dungeon walls, luminous, perhaps, so that the captive may never overlook them. On one end the words will be, oh, achievement, the intellect, effort, authority, the future. On the other, socialization, democracy, the senses, freedom, the present. The captive sees the pendulum at one pole, hovering, and reads the luminous words and thinks, Right! Now it will stop! The pendulum has already begun its return swing. The captive, mesmerized, awaits the momentary rest at the other end, then reads again and is, for a split second, sure that the ordeal is over.

In Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann has the Devil describe Hell as consisting of two vast rooms, one hot enough to melt granite, and the other of a most intolerable cold, between which the inhabitants rush continually, for as soon as they are in the one, the other seems to be a heavenly bower. A wonderful description, one to excite the senses quite a bit and, if a bit harsher in consequence, quite in line with our pendulum. Back and forth; as soon as we are in one place, we must head, shrieking, for the other.

-James Herndon. (from “The Pendulum,” Notes From A Schoolteacher)

Gerald Bracey said that “The latest of these scare tactics, Tough Choices or Tough Times, might be the dumbest, least democratic, least reality-based of them all.”

Our modern crusaders are talking about money - who gets to have it, and who gets to keep it. According to the Commission’s staff director, Marc Tucker, we risk “a declining standard of living, probably not for everybody, but for most people, that could create a kind of social instability that could be the undoing of the United States.”

Watch out for that social instability. It’s bad for the bottom line. There’s a problem here, though. The “deep vein of creativity” always rubs against the “self-disciplined and organized” part of the system. That’s the “core problem,” and it doesn’t have anything to do with high skills.

Susan Ohanian pointed to Marc Tucker’s Hillary Letter, where we can see that the sweep of the pendulum, this time, follows a political arc that has been over a decade in the making. This is not a grassroots initiative.

NCLB is tearing the system apart. Tough Choices or Tough Times is the blueprint proposed for its replacement. Searching the blueprint turns up numerous references to skill, achievement, economy, competition, and future. The words freedom, democracy, and happiness are not mentioned.

To see what the other pole of the pendulum’s swing looks like, read Walter C. Parker’s Teaching Against Idiocy:

Compared to home life, schools are like village squares, cities, crossroads, meeting places, community centers, marketplaces. When aimed at democratic ends and supported by the proper democratic conditions, the interaction in schools can help children enter the social consciousness of puberty and develop the habits of thinking and caring necessary for public life. They can learn the tolerance, the respect, the sense of justice, and the knack for forging public policy with others whether one likes them or not. If the right social and psychological conditions are present and are mobilized, students might even give birth to critical consciousness. This is the kind of thinking that enables them to cut through conventional wisdom and see a better way.

What are all the values of public education?

We have been to school. We are not in the grasp of ignorance or superstition…. Remember?