Makers, Innovators, and Raving Lunatics

According to John Taylor Gatto, schools have become (or have almost always been) corporate America's handmaiden, mind-numbing bastions of consumerism. Now if only you would buy his book (just three easy payments), he'd tell you all about it. Gatto scares me as much as the supposed horrors he describes. For him, public school is full of Bianca the animals and Trenchcoat mafia members just waiting to kill all of your children in the middle of the next standardized test.
I will not deny that public schooling has a 'public' interest, and that the line between public and corporate interest can occasionally blur almost to insignificance. Public education is partly designed to turn out workers and citizens that will "succeed" without challenging the status quo too strongly. Frederick Taylor's philosophies have almost certainly played a role in "Making" public school what it is today. And I will not deny that in the experiences of most kids, school can be dull, boring, or anxiety-ridden. But poorly executed practices do not defame first principals. All children deserve access to education, and not at their own expense. And at the classroom level, when genuine interaction occurs between a group of students and a teacher, real, meaningful learning can actually occur.
There are powerful obstacles to real, engaged, curiosity-driven learning, especially the Old White Guy perspective of Hirsch. In terms of actually reaching kids, innovators like John Dewey, Deborah Meier, and Geoffrey Canada (look up the Harlem Children's Zone) can have tremendous impact on both philosophy and practice. The focus has to be on the student has learned and can learn, not what the teacher or state wants to teach him.