ABSTRACT
The compulsory school project is necessarily evolving toward a universalized curriculum that will embrace all children everywhere, a process that is clearly well under way. The core discourses of schooling are all about the fundamentalist belief that professionalized institutions simply know what is best for people who they have assumed need to be under their care. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. Much like the urge to control nature, schools necessarily seek to standardize the lives of children with a globalizing logic that reduces self and local self-reliance, a very poor sister to professional service. Contemporary schools take it upon themselves to collect massive amounts of data on their students and to categorize, manage, and stream children overwhelmingly on the basis of statistical evidence.
