ABSTRACT
In many ways, schooling is the same assembly-line model that has existed for the past 150 years. Of course, there are still too many students who miss out: there are too many savage inequalities in the system, and there is much to do to improve the impact on all in the schooling enterprise. A major purpose of schooling is to enable opportunities for every child to be embraced and be ready for the challenges of living in, working in, and enjoying the twenty-first century world and having the skills, dispositions, and ethics to contribute to this world. Increasingly diverse and pluralistic societies require policy settings and educational practices that encourage common citizenship, social cohesion, resilience, and reliance on debate and discussion as problem-solving methods. Too often the answer is sought in creating different names for schools, and ironically, many of these suggested answers revert back to more stringent, straight lines: textbook-driven, over-controlled models mirroring the factory model.
