At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it.

We can make the trains run on time but if they are not going where we want them to go, why bother?

Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.