In the 100 years when we really got serious about education as a universally good idea, we've managed to take the fifteen years of children's lives that should be the most carefree, inquisitive and memorable and fill them with a motley collection of stress and a neurotic fear of failure. Education is a dress-up box of good intentions, swivel-eyed utopianism, cruel competition, guilt, snobbery, wish fulfillment, special pleading, government intervention, bureaucracy and social engineering. And no one is smart enough now to understand how we can stop it.
