More on School Reform
In my earlier Blog I said that if Diane Ravitch had read George Santayana’s Reason in Common Sense she wouldn’t have written her most recent book, The Death and Life of the American School System. Here is why I said that.
Santayana in the passage quoted, says this: Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement.
Isn’t this, in just two sentences, what Ravitch took 11 chapters and some 300 pages to say? Santayana’s words suggest that the schools will improve if we retain, or hold onto what’s there already (the good within them?). For too many reforms (changes) mean too little retention, or attention to what’s there. Too many reforms mean going in too many directions at once, and as a result going nowhere at all, which, as Ravitch says, has been the dismal outcome of our seemingly endless series of school reform movements up until now.
