there’s plenty of room for
dissatisfaction with the current state of our schools. An awful lot
is wrong with them: the way conformity is valued over curiosity and
enforced with rewards and punishments, the way children are
compelled to compete against one another, the way curriculum so
often privileges skills over meaning, the way students are prevented
from designing their own learning, the way instruction and
assessment are increasingly standardized, the way different avenues
of study are rarely integrated, the way educators are systematically
deskilled .