It seems both students and teachers have become hypnotized by the intensity of the struggle going on between them. They have forgotten schooling's more fundamental questions. My return to the trenches has made me realize how more profound issues of identity, politics, and experience will tend to be ignored unless theory stays out of bed with practice, and continues to wait in other rooms while policy-makers and politicians wrestle with the excitement, pleasure, and frustration of programmatic conception. Those inside the system feel only their hostility rising as children must submit to an outdated scheme and adults are called to enforce this scheme without the power to do so. Most of the people in the educational institutions are suffering and accomplishing little but cannot remember how their situations came to be this way.
School simply is .
They cannot function if their central myths are exposed and abandoned. The central myth of schooling is that schools exist to pass on the central values of the past. To do so, student populations must be controlled and guided. They fear that without such schools the nation will fragment into different cultural pockets and even languages and the basic skills will not be learned. Perhaps there is some truth in all of this.