The discourse of crisis has once again come into play in the field of education, and schools are once more the subject of an intense national debate. In the recent past, discussion has centered on whether schools can be the central institution for achieving racial and sexual equality; whether higher education in the traditional liberal arts curricula are still “relevant” to a changing labor market; whether the authoritarian classroom stifles the creativity of young children; or, conversely how permissiveness has resulted in a general lowering of educational achievement. All of these issues are still with us, but they have been subsumed under a much larger question: how to make the school curricula adequate to a changing economic, political and ideological environment?