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1 " Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term " liberal education." The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learningand education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature. "
2 " This framing accents the importance of building a tidier system, one that incorporates the array of existing child care centers, then pushes to make their classrooms more uniform, with a socialization agenda " aligned" with the curricular content that first or second graders are expected to know. Like the common school movement, uniform indicators of quality, centralized regulation, more highly credientialed teachers are to ensure that instruction--rather than creating engaging activities for children to explore--will be delivered in more uniform ways. And the state signals to parents that this is now the appropriate way to raise one's three- or four-year-old. Modern child rearing is equated with systems building in the eyes of universal pre-kindergarten advocates--and parents hear this discourse through upbeat articles in daily newspapers, public service annoucement, and from school authorities. "
3 " Among the world's evils—fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation— smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kid's school. "
― Jess Walter , The Financial Lives of the Poets
