Why School Reform Is Impossible
October 3, 2006
Commentary by Stephen Downes

"The structure of School is so deeply rooted that one reacts to deviations from it as one would to a grammatically deviant utterance: Both feel wrong on a level deeper than one's ability to formulate reasons. This phenomenon is related to 'assimilation blindness' insofar as it refers to a mechanism of mental closure to foreign ideas. I would make the relation even closer by noting that when one is not paying careful attention, one often actually hear the deviant utterance as the 'nearest' grammatical utterance a transformation that might bring drastic change in meaning."

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