Marion Brady is a veteran educator who is now 90 years old. He does not give up hope that a better education is possible.
He shared these quotes with me, and he invites you to contact him to discuss his views about curricular fragmentation. He has written often for Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet.
Curricular Fragmentation
John Goodlad: “The division into subjects and periods encourages a segmented rather than an integrated view of knowledge. Consequently, what students are asked to relate to in schooling becomes increasingly artificial, cut off from the human experiences subject matter is supposed to reflect.” A Place Called School, McGraw-Hill, 1984, p.266
Thomas Merton: “The world itself is no problem, but we are a problem to ourselves because we are alienated from ourselves, and this alienation is due precisely to an inveterate habit of division by which we break reality into pieces and then wonder why, after we have manipulated the pieces until they fall apart, we find ourselves out of touch with life, with reality, with the world, and most of all with ourselves.” Contemplation in a World of Action, Paulist Press, 1992, p.153)
Theodore Sizer: “The fact is that there is virtually no federal-level talk about intellectual coherence for [a student]. The curricular suggestions and mandates leave the traditional “subjects” in virtually total isolation, and both the old and most of the new assessment systems blindly continue to tolerate a profound separation of subject matters, accepting them as conventionally defined … The crucial, culminating task for [the student] of making sense of it all, at some rigorous standard, is left entirely to him alone.” School Reform and the Feds: The Perspective from Sam. Planning and Changing, v22 n3-4 p248-52 1991
Neil Postman: “There is no longer any principle that unifies the school curriculum and furnishes it with meaning.” Phi Delta Kappan, January 1983, p. 316
David W. Orr: [Formal schooling] “…imprints a disciplinary template onto impressionable minds and with it the belief that the world really is as disconnected as the divisions, disciplines, and subdivisions of the typical curriculum. Students come to believe that there is such a thing as politics separate from ecology or that economics has nothing to do with physics.” Earth in Mind, Island Press, 1994, p.23
Leon Botstein: “”We must fight the inappropriate fragmentation of the curriculum by disciplines . . .” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 1982, P. 28
Peter M. Senge: “From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole.” The Fifth Discipline, Currency Doubleday 1990, p.3
Harlan Cleveland: “It is a well-known scandal that our whole educational system is geared more to categorizing and analyzing patches of knowledge than to threading them together.” Change, July/August 1985, p. 20
Thomas Jefferson: “…every science is auxiliary to every other.” Extract from letter to Thomas Randolph, 27 August, 1786
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. “The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, and out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.” Preface to Breakfast of Champions
Buckminster Fuller: “American education has evolved in such a way it will be the undoing of the society.” (Quoted in Officer Review, March 1989, p.5)
Rene Descartes: “If, therefore, anyone wishes to search out the truth of things in serious earnest, he ought not to select one special science; for all the sciences are conjoined with each other and interdependent…” Rule 1, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 1628.
Alfred North Whitehead: “[We must] eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of the modern curriculum.” Presidential Address to the Mathematical Association of England, 1916
Felix Frankfurter: “That our universities have grave shortcomings for the intellectual life of this nation is by now a commonplace. The chief source of their inadequacy is probably the curse of departmentalization.” Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education, Mentor 1948
John Muir: “When we try to pick up anything by itself we find it is attached to everything in the universe.”
Ernest Boyer: “All of our experience should have made it clear by now that faculty and students will not derive from a list of disjointed courses a coherent curriculum revealing the necessary interdependence of knowledge.” (Paraphrased by Daniel Tanner in his review of Boyer’s book High School. Phi Delta Kappan, March 1984, p. 10)
Robert Stevens: “We have lost sight of our responsibility for synthesizing knowledge.” (Liberal Education, Vol. 71, No. 2, 1985, p.163)
Jonathan Smith: “To dump on students the task of finding coherence in their education is indefensible.” Quoted in Time, April 20, 1981, p. 50
John Kemeny: “The problems now faced by our society transcend the bounds of the disciplines.” Quoted by William Newell in Liberal Education, Association of American Colleges, 1983, Vol. 69, No. 3
Arnold Thackeray: “The world of our experience does not come to us in the pieces we have been carving out.” Quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1987, p. A 14
David Cohen: “Testing companies, textbook publishers, teacher specialists, associations representing specific content areas, and other agencies all speak in different and often inconsistent voices…The U.S. does not have a coherent system for deciding on and articulating curriculum and instruction.” (Phi Delta Kappan, March 1990, p. 522
Frank Betts: “Learning begins as an integrated experience as a newborn child experiences the world in its totality.” ASCD 1993, 13.7
Greg Stefanich and Charles Dedrick: “Learning is best when all of a student’s educational experiences merge to form an integrated whole, thereby transforming information into a larger network of personal knowledge.” Science and Mathematics, 1985, Vol.58, p.275
James Coomer: “Our educational systems . . . are now primarily designed to teach people specialized knowledge — to enable students to divide and dissect knowledge. At the heart of this pattern of teaching is . . . a view of the world that is quite simply false.” (Texas Tech Journal of Education, 1982, p.166)
Thích Nhất Hạnh: “People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one’s perception of reality.” The Miracle of Mindfulness, Beacon Press, 1975, 6
David Bohm: “I think the difficulty is this fragmentation. All thought is broken up into bits. Like this nation, this country, this industry, this profession and so on… And they can’t meet. That comes about because thought has developed traditionally in a way such that it claims not to be effecting anything but just telling you the way things are. Therefore, people cannot see that they are creating a problem and then apparently trying to solve it… Wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. If we can have a coherent approach to reality then reality will respond coherently to us.” Wholeness: A Coherent Approach to Reality (Presentation in Amsterdam, in 1990, documentary Art Meets Science & Spirituality in a Changing Economy.
Leonardo Da Vinci: “Learn how to see—realize that everything connects to everything else.”
Paul DeHart Hurd: “There are neither philosophical nor psychological grounds for compartmentalizing knowledge into islands of information as school subjects are currently conceived.” Middle School Journal, Vol. 20, No.5, p.22
James Moffett: “[It is essential to integrate] learning across subjects, media, and kinds of discourse so that individuals may continuously synthesize their own thought structures.” Phi Delta Kappan, September 1985, p. 55.
Tsunesaburo Makiguchi: “Through their studies, children must be brought to that point of awareness wherein . . . [they] get some sort of total picture of it all . . . In advancing level by level through the curriculum, students should be internalizing an overall idea structure of means and ends.” Education for Creative Living, 1989, p. 196
Stephanie Pace Marshall: “The natural world is now understood as an interdependent, relational, and living web of connections.” (The Power to Transform, Jossey-Bass, 2006, p. xii)
Richard A. Gibboney, “The atomized chop-chop of the high school curriculum has filtered up to higher education.” The Stone Trumpet, State University of New York Press, 1994. p. 9
Roger Schank: “Academics designed the school system. To them, it seemed natural that subjects that they were experts on should be taught in high school. Such a simple thought has created a major problem. Education ought not to be subject-based but, in a sense, we can’t help but think of it that way because we all went to schools that were subject-based.” (Teaching Minds, How cognitive science can save our schools). Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2011
Arthur Koestler: “…all decisive events in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines.” The Act of Creation, Penguin, London 1964
Albert Einstein: “I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole.” Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man (1983)
Association of American Colleges: “We do not believe that the road to a coherent education can be constructed from a set of required subjects or academic disciplines.” (“Integrity In the College Curriculum, A Report to the Academic Community,” Project On Redefining the Meaning and Purpose of Baccalaureate Degrees, 1985)
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: “The disciplines have fragmented themselves into smaller and smaller pieces, and undergraduates find it difficult to see patterns in their courses and relate what they learn to life.” Prologue to “College: The Undergraduate Experience in America,” November 1986
Marion Brady’s homepage: http://www.marionbrady.com/
His email: mbrady2222@gmail.com
Diane Ravitch's blog 
On the subject to curriculum…this in today’s NY Times
From the article :
“An apparent attempt to water down language about evolution and climate change in the guidelines for science education in New Mexico met with protests this week at an eventful public hearing at the Public Education Department’s offices in Santa Fe.
Hundreds of people — some of them demonstrating outside with signs — showed up to the event. The meeting lasted for hours, well past its noon deadline. At one point, someone interrupted the proceedings by setting off a fire alarm.
“The attendants overwhelmingly called for officials to include evolution and climate change in proposed standards that would guide science education for public school students. That was on Monday, and it appears the New Mexico Public Education Department heard their complaints; on Tuesday, it announced that it would incorporate the public’s suggestions.
“But some say that still wasn’t enough.
“All of this began last month, when the state’s education department unveiled a proposal to update its standards for science education for students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
“It borrowed language from the Next Generation Science Standards, a set of education guidelines that was released in 2013. (The standards, meant to be adopted — or at least adapted — by state-level education departments, were developed by a consortium of states and some national organizations like the National Research Council and the National Science Teachers Association.)
“But there were some notable differences between those standards and the ones that ended up in New Mexico’s original proposal. As Mother Jones reported last month, a mention of “the rise in global temperatures” was changed to: “the fluctuation in global temperatures.” A reference to “4.6 billion years” as the approximate age of the earth was erased. So was at least one mention of “evolution,” though other references to it remained.
Suddenly, the rather bureaucratic process of updating educational standards became a hot-button issue, one with statewide implications for political discourse and religious freedom. “It’s the latest battlefield in an ongoing war about to what extent we’re actually going to let children learn about what scientists say about climate change,” said Glenn Branch, the deputy director of the National Center for Science Education.”
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” but we are a problem to ourselves because we are alienated from ourselves, and this alienation is due precisely to an inveterate habit of division by which we break reality into pieces and then wonder why, after we have manipulated the pieces until they fall apart, we find ourselves out of touch with life, with reality, with the world, and most of all with ourselves.” I copied this out and sent this to 3 friends — it hit me this is what we are experiencing in our activities as we go about the week (all 3 of us are retired but extremely active in the political world right now)………
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“David W. Orr: [Formal schooling] “…imprints a disciplinary template onto impressionable minds and with it the belief that the world really is as disconnected as the divisions, disciplines, and subdivisions of the typical curriculum. Students come to believe that there is such a thing as politics separate from ecology or that economics has nothing to do with physics.” Earth in Mind, Island Press, 1994, p.23”. This one strikes me because we had a school committee debate with 5 candidates and the students were able to ask questions .
I had a copy of CIVITAS and my usual concern for “civic education” in a trumping world — but I found no connection from the experience of the “debate” and the concepts of civic education or CIVITAS. Quite disjointed for me (and I don’t know what the students got from the experience).
We have a brand new , modern production facility for “debates” in the City to capture on live TV/cable but we wanted it held at the High School (in the library ) to keep the students involved and encourage participation ; however, I can’t evaluate if we really achieved that goal.
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speaking of civics
RICHARD DREYFUS is eloquent as he explains what is afoot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=B6n0tr4TfEA
IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THIS, by Richard Dreyfus, do see it now; it explains the end of civics lessons, and the end of our shared history, and thus democracy.
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thank you Susan; we have been thinking and talking about this for a year and nothing seems to come of it; I guess we haven’t really descried the issues? A teacher said to me: “they are pulling the course work apart so that the civics education is done in the younger grades and then World History I and Government and World History II etc” become the blocks through high school and “until that happens and they have the course work structured into grades” then you will not see the progress in civics education — and of course the state insists they slap a “TEST from PEARSON” on it for accountability. I didn’t get the teacher’s words exactly but he was telling about how they keep blocking the courses; I imagine the math teachers are having the same issue with “where do you place the algebra” or something like that is going on (not my field so I’m out of touch).
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thank you for this, Susan Schwarz — I will share it with 3 people planning our next “Lyceum”… we are trying to get to “We Agree” and talk about the Constitution at 230 years (on November 21st in the Public Library). “bound by ideas ” what are the principles and the values…. and “learning how to run the country”
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He SURE is! Thanks for posting this.
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“Peter M. Senge: “From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole.” The Fifth Discipline, Currency Doubleday 1990, p.3”. I think of this one in specific classroom practices such as teaching “language experience”; or teaching written language; or teaching special education students etc.
Sometimes we make it so “formulaic” in the approach that we just don’t get to put anything back together again after we have made the “split” or divided up into the small tasks. In special ed we divide skills up even into what is “successful approximation” and, hopefully, there will be a synthesis but sometimes it never happens.
The approach of writing with some kind of inspiration or joy or creativity — yet we “routinize” the classroom instructional aspects and again, “formulaic” is the only word I can think of — and the instruction delivered by the teacher doesn’t come through as a positive result for the student. Anything that is routinized so much through drill and practice etc. I think Bob Shepherd has written here before about how that happened with reading “strategies” and he explains much better than I ever could.
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I remember when I first began to teach writing, how I poured over the books that I felt would inform my practice. 30 years after I had begun my practice, i wa suffered a position teaching 7th grade English, and one again, I went looking to see what others had done. I found Nancy Atwell.s “in The Middle” and loved it because it offered the way to win the minds of children… through motivation.
Motivating the brain of a child is the key, and all the ‘curriculum development’ advice in the world will fail to bring them to success, if they are bored to tears. The intrinsic reward for working hard, is there when one enjoys the process. They enjoyed telling gm e about their reading and what they found of interest, in those weekly letters to me, based on Atwell’s “Reader’s Letters.”
Thus, I had a weekly example of their thinking and their writing, no tot mention their reading. Thanks Nancy… and thanks to all the neglectful administrators who gave me a room and a class list, and said; “Teach!”
They let ME write my own curricula, and since I had 3 decades of experience in teaching children how to read and write, and because I had the NY STATE OBJECTIVES FOR then OUTCOMES in each grade, which BACKIN THE DAY was the only guidance we teachers had as to what we needed to do.
Education, experience, dedication and THE TALENT to engage children will do the job if the EXCEPTIONS ARE CLEAR, not a list of skills or information to be memorized for a test.
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Susan Lee Schwartz I wonder if you would re-post that Dreyfus video? Or tell me which thread it’s in. I cannot find it and wanted to view it later. CBK
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Here is the youtube.
I just love this, although it gets a bit long.
be well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=B6n0tr4TfEA
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Susan Lee Schwartz It didn’t show up in the note. What am I missing?
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I got it–thanks. GBSMe
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I sent it to two colleagues — we are planning the event at Malden Public Library for November 21st if anyone is in the area. The President of MA Center for Civic Education will speak to us on that evening ; the mayor has been invited; also the local state rep/senators. . We need a better focus on Civic Education in MA. (and I am agreeing with Sandra Stotsky on what that should like ; but there are some contentious arguments going on )
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jeanhaverhill Someone should send it to Bill Gates. I watched it–and the other one also. (Though I thought Dreyfus could have done better on that Fox News program.)
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yes, I am back in the Stone Age as well; “I had the NY STATE OBJECTIVES FOR then OUTCOMES in each grade, which BACKIN THE DAY was the only guidance we teachers had as to what we needed to do.”
I was in a relatively affluent/more affluent town west of MA only 20 miles; but we would buy (personally, as teachers) the curriculum guides out of Newton MA that were Language Arts. The “curriculum” lists/objectives in my town were not to be found; they would buy a book and when you ask “what is the curriculum?” they would put the book on the table. Yes, there were problems with that — but today’s “common core” takes it to proportions that are way out of “whack”.
The R&D labs had some responsibility for curriculum (beyond the book publishers) like Far West Lab; I first met Nancy Atwell when the New England “Lab” was first funded. The commissioners of the 5 New England states and New York were meeting together to get it off the ground. The original site was called NEREX and we brought in Nancy Atwell at that time and of course specialists in math. Technology was just beginning to get off the ground– and, again, it has been totally distorted way out of proportion at this time.
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I have to make dinner, but I have a great deal to say about the development of ANY curricular if the objective is LEARNING.
YOU , JEAN , know that my practice was selected by Pew to be matched to he RUBRIC for
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I have to make dinner, but I have a great deal to say about the development of ANY curricular if the objective is LEARNING.
YOU , JEAN , know that my practice was selected by Pew to be matched to the RUBRIC for
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The DEFORMERS want to reduce students and teachers and thus this country to PAVLOV’s DOG. Easier to CONTROL others while the DEFORMERS pull our strings.
RESIST.
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yes, Yvonne , that is true; Pavlov had the money to spend on his labs; Pavlov got translated into English first and the U.S. took it wholeheartedly. Meanwhile, Chukovsky and Vygotsky didn’t get translated into English until Bruner somehow got the funds to translate — so we have been a “pavlovian” psychology place (this did not happen in the United Kingdom in the field of psychology to the extent that it did in our school psychology programs). Psychology in the U.S. became counting the number of “pecks” by pigeons — and we lost site of the inter-relationships in families, the teacher- pupil, Martin Buber’s “I/thou” and the socratic teaching methods.
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LOVE Marion Brady and his work. Thanks, Diane.
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“David Cohen: “Testing companies, textbook publishers, teacher specialists, associations representing specific content areas, and other agencies all speak in different and often inconsistent voices…The U.S. does not have a coherent system for deciding on and articulating curriculum and instruction.” (Phi Delta Kappan, March 1990, p. 522”.
This is why we have the “reading wars” and the “math wars”. and the “social studies” (war that has been since Liz Cheney was in Washington — Sandra Stotsky tries to explain what should be happening (I am on her side in the MA social studies war) but others have a different viewpoint and it is still in flux . )
The reading wars I pretty much settled in my own world and I base a lot of my choices on Keith Stanovich’s work — so you can see which side of the “War ” I am on.)
The math wars played out in the “TERC” curriculum here in MA and it was obvious to me on the standaridized tests which students had “TERC” in their math curriculum and which ones did not ….. (this was before they started playing around with the Pearson test products– so I have to step out of this one — not my field)
Fordham Institute started a “Christmas war” about 3 years ago when they said “students in christian countries get higher test scores”. Bill O’Reilly would like that one.
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“Frank Betts: “Learning begins as an integrated experience as a newborn child experiences the world in its totality.” ASCD 1993, 13.7”. some of the best work on this has been in language development studies. Carol Chomsky did some good work here while Harvard was working on reading studies (JeanneChall, etc). Vygotsky’s scaffolding also comes through this work — he would research how a child’s performance task would improve when language was brought into the picture and the child had the concept and the label/word and could approach the task with that added bonus of understanding.
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The argument against curricular fragmentation and by extension against all fragmentation is IMHO an argument for the advancement of the discipline of Systems Thinking, an idea that, as demonstrated by the quotes in this post, has long been known of in various ways. More recently, Systems Thinking has been somewhat attenuated by the silos that accumulated via professions, but I remain hopeful that a breakout is possible. The “conflict” between Systems Thinking and the need for and benefits of specialization due to the complexity and depth of our knowledge in a wide array of disciplines bears renewed examination and requires an updated resolution. Destroying the silos is not the answer, building wide pathways between them is.
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I agree about not destroying the silos. There is wisdom in the quotes Marion provided, but the devil is in the details. At the K-12 level, it seems to me that it makes sense to segregate the knowledge domains for the sake of efficient teaching. If you meld biology, Chinese and band, there’s a good chance that none of the three subjects will be taught well and to mastery. Trying to do more interdisciplinary teaching has been a perennial goal at my schools for my whole career –the attempts always founder. Keep it simple. Once strong foundations for all subjects have been built, then students should be led to integrate them.
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Diane Excellent set of quotes. The great “However,” however, is that the problem is not differentiation but (as stated in some of the notes) fragmentation. But the process of differentiation with detail is ESSENTIAL to the learning process, especially for children who are too-easily overloaded with meaning that they cannot possibly process precisely because they have not had the incremental background yet.
But human consciousness naturally interrelates and integrates what has been first differentiated as a matter of ongoing process. The cure for fragmentation is interrelating and integration, not destroying the differentiation process that is key to ongoing development, not just of children, but of progress in human history itself. That K-12 schools have not mirrored that process by overtly offering ways to complement differentiation with interrelating and integration as overt systematic aspects of a developmental curriculum is the fundamental problem–not differentiation of subjects or fields. We DO leave children to do their own relating and integrating. BIG PROBLEM.
And speaking of making distinctions, I think in several of these quotes, “fragmentation” is confused with “differentiation” as they seem to be wrongly pointing to the problem as one of distinguishing hard-won and authentically different fields of study, for instance, history, math, physics, psychology, and sociology?
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Nothing but fortune cookie philosophy. Every single one of those requires a gigantic “citation needed.”
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You could google them.
Marion Brady is 90 years old, and he has been collecting these axioms for many years.
Have a heart.
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those are mostly famous authors and writers; I have met a lot of them along the way in my teaching career and learning about school programs. I don’t think those outstanding figures need “citations”…. Do we have to say “Einstein”. citation? as if no one knew or had been familiar with him? And for those of us who know the work, there is a lot more than “fortune cookie” because each quotation brings up a web of ideas. But if you have not heard of the writers and have no experience in reading their work (in the past) thenI guess it would look like random bits — I feel sorry for anyone who is in that situation
The only one I felt unfamiliar with was Coomer but if it was James Comer he has a very important model of school and health care and he was chosen to be on Obama’s committee studying the issues. When I hear a composer’s name like Tchaikovsky or Mendelsohn, the actual music from some performance comets my mind– that is the way I feel when I see those names with the quotes because they bring many elaborations of ideas and meaning to the world of education.
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This is a great topic. I’ve often looked back on my college course selections, wishing I’d paired some some history courses with the French & Spanish lit I studied. But then, why was I a cowardly weakling in history? Maybe because I chose to squeeze the entire world’s history into a 2-mo hisch summer sch course— of course, so I’d have room to take Fr I-IV & Latin I & II! Same kind of thinking behind coll course selections: no room for hist if you’re intent on pursuing Fr & Sp thro 400-500 level plus as much art hist as will fit (while squeezing in German I&II). To me, the multiple disciplines were a dazzling smorgasbord from which I was allowed to gorge on my favorites. Synthesis schmynthesis!
How do we begin deconstructing? Perhaps by gathering the disciplines under historical eras, to be studied a couple of grades at a time? (Just one thought– there must be many ways to do this…)
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We could do much should we simply agree to study our country’s true history through the lens of each distinct cultural grouping.
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W. Edward Deming: “The pyramid contributes to fragmentation of the organization. In fragmentation, each component becomes an individual profit centre, destroying the system.”
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It’s interesting that just about all of the people Brady cites as critics of disciplines are specialists in one or more disciplines themselves.
Here is what Howard Gardner and colleague Veronica Boix-Mansilla wrote about interdisciplinary learning about 20 years ago:
educational psychologists Howard Gardner and Veronica Boix-Mansilla:
“‘Current debates around the organization of pre-collegiate curriculum have directed considerable criticism at the dominant role assumed by subject matter or disciplines. Criticisms have ranged from a call for interdisciplinary or theme-based curricula to an emphasis on ‘ways of knowing,’ or ‘learning styles’ as organizing units that replace disciplinary knowledge.
“‘In this article, while acknowledging the merit of some of the critique, we propose a positive view of disciplinary knowledge. We claim that, over the years, knowledgeable human beings working in specific domains have developed concepts, methods, and perspectives as means of better understanding the physical, biological, and social worlds around us. We find students’ access to these disciplinary tools to be an indispensable ingredient of quality education. Shorn of disciplines we become intellectual barbarians.’” (Gardner & Boix-Mansilla, 198).
The authors then comment on classroom experiences that are advertised as interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary:
“'[I] t is crucial to note that interdisciplinary work can be carried out legitimately only after the individual has become at least somewhat conversant in the relevant disciplines. Much of what is termed interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary work in the early grades is actually pre-disciplinary work – drawing chiefly on common sense.’” (Gardner & Boix-Mansilla, 208)
To that I would add: I hope it’s still possible to learn from the “education reform” movement that when you disparage, dismantle and destroy a less than ideal system, you often get something much worse. Traditional disciplines are one of the few defenses against the “disruptive innovation” policies of edreform.
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