Our kids believe having a cell phone and a car confers adulthood and freedom. Political campaigns are packaged marketing messages that feed on our shallow desires for a knight on a white horse, cleansing our public spaces of any real social or political problem while leaving a springtime-fresh scent to cover their lies and personal follies. America s commerce should be exported but not its consumerism. Maybe other countries are resisting our consumerism because they want a culture based on something more. One of the unsavory features of monopoly education is that the same set of teacher trainers makes the workshop circuit, scarfing up taxpayer dollars and dispensing nostrums as though they were tested ideas for immediate classroom application.
Workshops tend to the cutesy.
Were education a competitive industry, the workshop circuit would offer more substantive fare because consumers and teachers would be in a position to demand it.