Articles of faith (in education)

h/t to Andrew Sullivan for pointing me to this excerpt from Getting Schooled in Harper's:

In the increased emphasis on data and the imposed emphasis on standardized jargon and tests, including the standardized inanities that result (no student I meet seems to believe that the universe formed in six days but a disturbing number insist that an essay is always formed in five paragraphs), I sense the encroachment of the totalitarian “business model” that has destroyed family farming as a way of life, of the same itch for arcane nomenclature that has turned literary criticism into a pseudoscience. A veteran foreign-language teacher still going strong since my last stint at school says to me with a sigh, “I’m afraid the day of the teacher-as-artist is drawing to a close.”