After World War II, all the people who had joined the Resistance were hailed as heroes. Everyone else was considered a weakling and/or a dupe.

If we ever win the Education Wars (by that I mean, if ever sensible pragmatic education practices become the norm), we're going to look back at the Education Establishment we have now as subversives and greedy careerists.

Well, that’s my sense of it.

Accordingly, I’m always wondering if we couldn’t possibly ask the teachers to do a bit more to stop all the nonsense. Or how about asking the students themselves to fight back? How? Learn more. Take control of their own education.

That was a theme of a piece addressed to students called “Memo to public school student: fight back.”

http://www.examiner.com/article/memo-to-public-school-students-figh...

Maybe you know students who would enjoy this. Maybe you know teachers who could use it in social studies as a way to stir up debate.

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 Here is a somewhat more poetic sense of things. I think every time a student learns a piece of information, the Education Establishment suffers a little. What they want is placid, empty-headed mediocrity. Just imagine some kid who can rattle off the names of all 50 states. Oh my, that's like a cross to Dracula. Now imagine a million kids who can do this. The Education Establishment will writhe in torment like some alien creature in a sci-fi movie. A bit extreme? Okay, it was a literary conceit. But you get my point. Didn't they used to say that men in the South wanted to keep women barefoot and pregnant? Same idea.