Diane Ravitch The Death and Life of the Great American School System

I've just started Diane Ravitch's new book. Early on she writes about the necessity for a policy maker seeing like a state. She says "...I began 'seeing like a state,' looking at schools and teachers and students from an altitude of 20,000 feet and seeing them as objects to be moved around by big ideas and great plans. It reminded me of a distinction I heard many years ago.

I was working for the American Friends Service Committee as Director of the High School Program for the Middle Atlantic Region. Among other things, I organized four seminars for students throughout the region which met in Washington, DC. The topics varied. This particular one was on international relations, the Cold War, Democracy vs. Communism. It was back in the late 60s. One particular scholar made a distinction - between idealism and ideology.
His point was that the roots of the two concepts in language and thought were very different. One, quite American - was idealism; we are, by intellectual disposition, idealists. The other, based on the Greek ideos, has a very different basis. Ideologies are abstract systems. He spent some time talking about Plato.

In any case, I've been thinking about the Race to the Floor, Standards vs Standardization, etc. and it occurred to me that his distinction might be useful to me. The present controllers of the debate are ideologues, not idealists. What happens to the school as a living organism when ideology replace idealism?

Oh, I thought I'd give you some Bach. Click on the Left.