Quote of the Morning

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See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?%5Fencoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Lawrence%20Arthur%20Cremin -- our thanks to Michael Goldenberg for bringing this to our attention.

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"American economic competitiveness with Japan and other nations is to a considerable degree a function of monetary, trade, and industrial policy, and of decisions made by the President and Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Departments of the Treasury, Commerce, and Labor. Therefore, to conclude that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by educational reform, especially educational reform defined solely as school reform, is not merely utopian and millennialist, it is at best a foolish and at worst a crass effort to direct attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the burden instead on the schools. It is a device that has been used repeatedly in the history of American education."

[Popular Education and its Discontents by Lawrence Arthur Cremin pp. 102-103, paperback, 1990 -- available at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?%5Fencoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Lawrence%20Arthur%20Cremin ]

Review from Publishers Weekly -- Distinguished historian of education Cremin ( Traditions of American Education ) comments on salient aspects of the nation's schooling in these three lectures delivered in 1989. After identifying "popularization," "multitudinousness" and "politicization" as abiding characteristics of American education and as sources of crisis, he distances himself from recent doomsayers. In his view, the system's crises and its strengths stem from attempts to balance the "tremendous variety of demands Americans have made on their schools and colleges," and from efforts to provide for the extraordinary diversity of young people. Cremin's reflections offer guidance for educational policymakers who face the complex imperatives of the 1990s. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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