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The "slow food" movement began as a protest against the global proliferation of McDonald's restaurants. Mr. Holt calls for a similar backlash against today's "hamburger" approach toward education, which emphasizes uniformity, predictability, and measurability of processes and results.
WHEN THE YOUNG Cole Porter left his elementary school in Indiana for a prep school on the East Coast, his mother gave his age as 12, although he was in fact two years older. She had always encouraged his musical gifts and evidently decided that two more years at home, practicing the piano and entertaining passengers on the passing riverboats, was a better way of fostering his songwriting abilities. We should all be grateful for her foresight.
In today's school climate, Kate Porter's deception appears both unlikely and unwise. The pressure to proceed from one targeted standard to another as fast as possible, to absorb and demonstrate specified knowledge with conveyor-belt precision, is an irresistible fact of school life. Parents are encouraged to focus on achievement, not self-realization. A present-day Porter would soon be labeled a nerdy slow learner if he flunked the math test and preferred the keyboard to a baseball bat. It's curious that, in an age when the right of adults to shape their own lifestyle is taken for granted, the right of children to an education that will help them make something of themselves is more circumscribed than ever.
This curriculum straitjacket is the price exacted for believing that education is about assessed performance on specified content. The march toward ruthless conformity began in the 1970s, as the Cold Warriors blamed schools for the supposed deficiencies in American technology. It gained momentum in the 1980s, when, as Arthur Levine has noted, the generation born after World War II became young urban professionals, and "the education of their children became the baby boomers' and the nation's preoccupation."2 The 1983 Reagan-era report A Nation at Risk set the agenda for all that has followed. Influenced on the one hand by the idea that education is an atomistic, science-- like activity, and on the other by the output-led simplicities of supply-side economics, schools in America have been in the grip of some form of standards-based reform for nearly 20 years.
The current Administration of George...