you'd have to say that this approach to education reflects the basic strictures or canons of squishy totalitarianism; it's squishy in that it doesn't torture or exile you: it works to transform consciousness from the ground up so that actual physical coercion is redundant. not only that, but the approach is completely central to the sort of internationalist merger of state and capital, a world regulatory regime of productive service workers and bureaucrats. i would say that people like tom friedman and al gore are the marxes or jeffersons of this movement. (well maybe it's habermas.) but what they always emphasize is that american education has to compete with chinese or danish education...as measured by performance on standardized tests. this is so far distant from the life of any actual child that it's just a vicious abstraction; who could raise their children according to this idea of global competitivenes etc? at any rate, the position is: a single global economy, international institutions, free trade and regulated markets, "development," and always: a single world model of education.

one thing that i think is obvious: it's going to be a lot harder to shape the human soul than one might think: we are recalcitrant. the local and strange is going to be in constant...juxtaposition.in a situation in which knowledge, expertise etc are the product of institutions, even mere ignorance or irrationality is a worthwhile form of resistance.