What is it about our nation and not a few others that a fully funded and fully
public education and the people who work in it are demonized? Why has
schooling been singled out, when it’s clear that the economic and political crises
we are experiencing did not start there? Why focus on schools and public
employees when the financial sector and dominant economic elites seems to get
off with hardly a slap on the wrist? Why engage in a “race to the bottom” by
attacking the gains made by some workers, when we should instead be focusing
on why so many other workers are losing the pensions and health care that they
deserve? These are of course complicated questions, some of which I have tried
to answer elsewhere (Apple 2006). But one thing is ever more clear. Schools are
seen in a very contradictory way. They are seen to be key elements of the causes
of our problems. Thus radically changing them (through an odd combination of
privatization and competition and stronger central control) is imperative. “Good”
schools are those and only those that hew to a corporate agenda and a corporate
image. “Bad” schools are all the rest. And the people who work in them need a
good dose of competition and tighter control. But through it all, what is evident
is the loss of commitment to collective responsibility. It’s almost as if schooling
itself as a collective process is an enemy, a source of pollution that threatens the
purity of market solutions and possessive individualism.