I was invited to cross post my last entry to blog.Mises, where "Robert" left this interesting comment, which takes Mises's general point about government planners and applied it more specifically to the history of American schooling:

What a perfectly fitting metaphor for life in the feedlot. This excerpt brings forth visions of turn of the century industrialists and money changers moving to remake our education system in order to produce a more docile, maleable citizenry. Can you say Dewey, et al? These men, at the behest of the monied oligarchy, colluded to ensure a semi-literate, uneducated working class was made available to "attain the ends which [they] he has assigned to them in his own plans."

Fast forward nearly a century and the evidence abounds. A knowledge stunted, adolescent citizenry, unable to ascertain the source of their own disquiet, stumbles headlong through life unable to recognize, let alone attempt, a life well lived.

NCLB, to be sure, is emblematic of state sponsored indoctrination plans devised by bureaucrats to "use his fellow citizens as means for the attainment of his own ends, which differ from those they themselves are aiming at." Our current cadre of education cowpokes, complacent to their desired ends, may soon wake to hear the herd stampeding toward camp, unstoppable.