The turtle hypodermic of sickenpods

"In other, more enlightened countries, where teachers are happy and students are literate, the number of bureaucrats administering the educational system is less than one percent of the number employed here - and here, as David Solway points out, those bureaucrats are not administering the system but betraying it. "Turtle hypodermic of sickenpods" is a malapropism, an exuberant play on words, produced by one of David Solway's students to describe this "total epidemic of psychopaths"--Or bureaucrats. It's a flash of whimsy that slips past the spell-check but has no place in today's classrooms." "For our schools have become companies - education companies - complete with downsizing and cost-benefit analyses, where students are, as defined in a recent pedagogical bulletin, "client" and teachers "people who intervene" in the educational process. The curriculum is now a step-by-step procedure in which everything must be measured - and only those things that can be measured are valued - and mechanically "solved": analysis of War and Peace obligingly conforms to the ten steps of changing a flat tire. Improvisation, imagination, flexibility, surprise, delight - elements which, as Solway argues, comprise the essence of both learning and teaching, are ironed out by perpetual assessment and rigid routine." "While political leaders and corporate CEOS, focusing as usual on the quarterly return, call for "workers for the new economy," their educational reforms are producing just that: students with a grab-bag of minor skills and competencies and minds that are sadly uneventful, incapable of genuine intellectual achievement and lacking any sense of continuity with the historical and cultural traditions of our society. Their world is small, bleak, and limited; their world will become ours." "David Solway describes the betrayal of the ancient covenant between teacher and student, the loss of passion on one side, and eagerness on the other, to the detriment of us all."--Jacket.