you might say everything I've ever blogged puts a little flesh on those bones. With the slightest encouragement, I might be really deviant!

(I'll try to flesh out deviance, and the tension between institution and individual, in my next comments.)

I was schooled for 20 years but my real-life education somehow managed to overcome it. Most kids aren't that lucky, to grow into well-educated adult lives animated at every turn by questioning and learning, thinking new thoughts and contributing actively to the community of ideas and progress. Institutional School doesn't educate the individual in that sense; it gets in the way.

Institutional schooling has taught our fellow citizens so much about duty and failure and tedium, conforming their own internal life to external demands, that most inevitably become workaday parents and teachers (and voters and politicians) who simply follow and enforce and further entrench society's rules and restrictions, rather than rethinking them. They pass all this on in turn. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be . . .and they soldier on.

How controlling and conservative, how hidebound, what a monstrous millstone for progressives to drag behind ANY political bandwagon. Maybe that isn't entirely School's "fault" but public education could do much better at preparing the next generation to be Thinking Citizens. Imagine what a culture that could be, and what politicians would thrive in it, rather than what we know now.

There's even an educators' argument coalescing around the idea that education IS democratic engagement".

No one is excited or inspired (or educated) by standardized, Bowdlerized textbook and workbook pabulum, or a student's dutiful five-paragraph essay, any more than politics or culture can progress via poll-tested stump soundbites and dime-a-dozen American Idol warbler wannabes. And fighting the last war instead of the next one, well, we've seen what disasters follow.

Message discipline is for mindless troops under orders, led by those with absolute faith in their own "right" answers. To me that fits the bones of (conservative) school and church, the military, industrial quality control and factory production. Not the supporting structures of (liberal) education and innovation, R&D, creative design, risk-taking, and social progress built on the pooled but undiluted, uncompromised wisdom of a multitude of diverse individuals.

Schools teach the last test. Education writes the next one. Which is better for progressive politics? The answer to that is easy, but getting activists to understand and ask themselves the question in the first place is hard. I attribute it to too much schooling . . .