When I Was Young, I Was Religious.

The First Ten, Twelve Or Fifteen Years Of Life Are Excavated Of Inherent Moral Worth In Order To Accommodate A Regimen Of Basic Training For The Adult Years That Many Of The Poorest Children May Not Even Live To Know.

By Far The Most Important Factor In The Success Or Failure Of Any School, Far More Important Than Tests Or Standards Or Business-model Methods Of Accountability, Is Simply Attracting The Best-educated, Most Exciting Young People Into Urban Schools And Keeping Them There.

I'd Love To Go Back And Teach Primary School. I Used To Teach Fourth Grade And Fifth Grade. I'd Love To Spend Several Years Teaching Kindergarten Or Maybe Third Grade.

But What Is Now Encompassed By The One Word (“school”) Are Two Very Different Kinds Of Institutions That, In Function, Finance And Intention, Serve Entirely Different Roles. Both Are Needed For Our Nation’s Governance. But Children In One Set Of Schools Are Educated To Be Governors; Children In The Other Set Of Schools Are Trained For Being Governed. The Former Are Given The Imaginative Range To Mobilize Ideas For Economic Growth; The Latter Are Provided With The Discipline To Do The Narrow Tasks The First Group Will Prescribe.

I Feel, In The End, As If Everything I've Done Has Been A Failure.