Civil disobedience was not the problem. The greatest danger was civil obedience*

Democracies are famously bad at coping with change. My own theory is that when you allow citizens to have a voice you set up the potential for a much more responsive government that is closer to the lives of people, yet the institutions created by that very government have a vested interest in the status quo because the status quo conserves their power and as Michel Foucault tells us, institutions have as strong an instinct for self preservation as individuals do. So right off the bat democracies have a built in contradiction, on the one hand valuing the voice of the people, who live close to the unpredictable fires of modernity, while on the other resisting that voice in order to maintain institutional privilege and control.

The Senate's failure to pass even a weak form of gun control legislation in spite of overwhelming support among the public is but the latest example of this inherent democratic contradiction at work. In an earlier time of governmental deafness Howard Zinn asked what is to be done when a representative government stops being representative. His answer crystalized the solution to this political design flaw:

The good things that have been done, the reforms that have been made, the wars that have been stopped, the women's rights that have been won, the racism that has been partly extirpated in society, all of that was not done by government edict, was not done by the three branches of government. It was not done by that structure which we learn about in junior high school, which they say is democracy. It was all done by citizens' movements. And keep in mind that all great movements in the past have risen from small movements, from tiny clusters of people who came together here and there. When a movement is strong enough it doesn't matter who is in the White House; what really matters is what people do, and what people say, and what people demand.

I might quibble a bit with Dr. Zinn here and say that it is government edict that puts the period on the sentence started by citizen discourse, as in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for example, but essentially he is correct. Change in a democracy must make its way from the distant fringes of society to the center of power, a long, arduous and in no way certain journey.

Which brings me to the point of all this, and that is the increasingly loud and numerous voices being raised against the corporatization of public schools. While there have always been those who have warned about the movement from public education to privilege education, their voices were mostly drowned out by the educational-industrial complex. Now however there appears to be a chrous growing. Some examples:

Republicans, of all people, have come out against the Common Core, calling it “an inappropriate overreach to standardize and control” education.

People are beginning to notice that Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee, once the Emperor and Empress of educational change, have no clothes.

Parents and students are beginning to organize a resistance.

Legislatures are revisiting their assumptions about the efficacy of one size fits all.

So how far along the road from radical idea to institutional policy have we come? I'm not sure. These roads are not straight and they don't always go directly to their destination, plus this situation is a little different because neoliberal forces drove us from a more traditional idea of what public education in a democratic society was and we're trying to get that back.

Still, it's hard not to see that something is changing and a movement is growing. That's the promising news. The reality is that we're still a long way from where we need to be, and quite probably have lost an entire generation of children to the industrialization of education, a mistake for which the price will take years to determine, and even longer to pay.

*Howard Zinn (paraphrased)