Diane Ravitch, “Reign of Error”

Diane Ravitch's new book, “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools,” is formidable. She takes on the rich, well-connected “corporate reformers” like Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, test scores, students as commodities, “accountability,” educational “crisis” mongers, charter schools, and vouchers.

The following passage is from her next-to-last chapter, “Privatization of Public Education is Wrong,” p. 301. A highly successful businessman (an ice cream maker) had given a lecture to some teachers on why and how they should operate their school like a business, saying things like “If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn't be in business for long.” The lecture was not well received and one of the teachers asked him what he does when he receives a shipment of inferior blueberries for his ice cream:

“I send them back.”

She jumped to her feet. “That's right!” She barked, “and we can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with ADHD, junior rheumatoid arthritis and English as their second language. We take them all! Every one! And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it's not a business. It's a school.”

The businessman recalls realizing when the teacher said that, “I was dead meat.”

Ravitch proposes eleven “solutions,” devoting one chapter for each. Her first, and I think most important, solution is in the chapter entitled “Begin at the Beginning:”

     "SOLUTION NO. 1 Provide good prenatal care for every pregnant woman."

She is also a wise and thorough critic of an immense amount of erroneous assumption and flawed experiment. She doesn't deal with one of the major questions I have, which is whether or not USA children are truly loved in themselves rather than considered to be impedimenta or ornaments, but neither does any educator that I have read “go there.”

I recognize the inconceivably large body of writing, research, assertion, and argument on the subject of education but I always come back to Plutarch's sentence in his essay “On Listening.” It is compatible with what Ravitch writes. It seems simple but it also seems to be so basic that you can evaluate any theory of educational method by its compatibility with this statement:

“For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth.”