ABSTRACT
There is a conspiracy of vision amid efforts to remake American schools for the 21st century. The conspirators include cognitive scientists who have redefined learning and teaching in terms radically at odds with the common practices of American schools (Bruer, 1993; Cohen, McLaughlin, & Talbert, 1993; Gardner, 1989, 1991; Jones & Idol, 1990; Perkins, 1992). They are well positioned to dispute the powerful influences on current school design of their predecessors in psychology—the behaviorists with their passion for mincing teaching and learning, and the early theorists of intelligence with their passion for discriminatory measurement (Gould, 1981; Resnick & Resnick, 1991; Wolf, Bixby, Glenn, & Gardner, 1991). The conspirators also include organizational theorists, drawing inspiration from change under way in some American corporations (Bolman & Deal, 1991; Fullan, 1991; Mauriel, 1989; Senge, 1990). Many of their prescriptions are animated by economic anxiety, the U.S. having a long history of associating economic anxiety with school. They suggest, now as in the Taylorist past, that what is good for the Ford Motor Company is good for the schools, and vice versa. Finally, the conspirators include principals, teachers, and university-based school reformers, who labor under the abiding influence of their century-leaping mentor, John Dewey. These men and women tend to the practical details of the vision and make it seem realizable by providing a few exemplars (Fiske, 1991; Meier, 1992, 1993; Sizer, 1992; Wood, 1992).
