obama's education program, offhand, is an intensification of - and is worse and more disturbing than - bush's. obviously, "accountability," "rewarding good teachers," "progress" etc - in short every aspect and every phrase, every strategy and every slogan - only means standardized testing: the entire discipline and discourse is now entirely composed of euphemisms for an ever-more-rigid, ever-less-humanistic, ever-more-impoverished, and ever-more-mindless rote recall. in addition: ever-more-centralized, ever-more-uniform, ever-more-bureaucracy-ridden, ever-more-authoritarian. obama shares the beautiful vision of clinton, gore, or tom friedman: little bobby the american first-grader is in competition with little li the chinese first-grader, in the global economy of the 23rd century: those words should be engraved on arne ducan's cattle prod. nothing could be more irrelevant to the actual education of an actual child, or more reprehensible as a conception of human life. it actually constitutes an extremely convincing case for a worldwide spiral into economic disintegration: it makes poverty, ignorance, and chaos look beautiful.