Over recent years, [there's been] a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers so that [teachers] have to teach to tests and the test determines what happens to the child, and what happens to the teacher...that's guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process: it means the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students' needs, that a student can't pursue things [...] and the teacher's future depends on it as well as the students'...the people who are sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this - they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful [...] the assessment itself is completely artificial; it's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who reach their potential, explore their creative interests and so on [...] you're getting some kind of a 'rank,' but it's a 'rank' that's mostly meaningless, and the very ranking itself is harmful. It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important.

It's highly destructive...in, say, elementary education, you're training kids this way [...] I can see it with my own children: when my own kids were in elementary school (at what's called a good school, a good-quality suburban school), by the time they were in third grade, they were dividing up their friends into 'dumb' and 'smart.' You had 'dumb' if you were lower-tracked, and 'smart' if you were upper-tracked [...] it's just extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education. Education is developing your own potential and creativity. Maybe you're not going to do well in school, and you'll do great in art; that's fine. It's another way to live a fulfilling and wonderful life, and one that's significant <i>for other people as well as yourself</i>. The whole idea is wrong in itself; it's crea

في ديمقراطيات رأسمالية الدولة ، عمل الصراع الشعبي الطويل و المرير على توسيع و إغناء الميدان الشعبي. في الوقت الذي عملت فيه السلطة الخاصة المركزة جاهدة للحد منه . تشكل هذه النزاعات جزءاً كبيراً من التاريخ الحديث، و الطريقة الأكثر فعالية للحد من الديمقراطية هي نقل عملية اتخاذ القرار من الميدان الشعبي إلى المؤسسات غير الخاضعة للمحاسبة : كالملوك و الأمراء ، أو الطبقات الكهنوتية المنغلقة ، أو العصب العسكرية المسيطرة على الحكومة إثر انقلاب أو الديكتاتوريات الحزبية ، أو الشركات الحديثة

The basic principle I would like to see communicated to people is the idea that every form of authority and domination and hierarchy has to prove that its justified - it has no prior justification. For instance, when you stop your five year old kid from trying to cross the street, that's an authoritarian situation: it's got to be justified. Well, in that case you can give a justification. But the burden of proof for any exercise of authority is always on the person exercising it - invariably. And when you look, most of the time those authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else - they are just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top.