If the Coleman report was so influential, why aren't protestors demanding busing? I'd hazard a guess that most protestors are either sociology students, or in c

If the Coleman report was so influential, why aren't protestors demanding busing? I'd hazard a guess that most protestors are either sociology students, or in close contact with sociology students (or graduates). Another big study was the one that found Direct Instruction (a slightly faddish, but still fairly conservative / traditional model - "tell 'em, show 'em, make 'em do it themselves") was the best fad evaluated, by a significant margin. But for some reason, education seems to favor a model in which teachers try to mimic the heroic Robin Williams in the Dead Poet's Society. Education reforms are dominated by a few main threads, most of which are rubbish (if you look at the evidence) - the managerial Econ101 (www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html) type model (reward teachers for good test scores - politicians generally like this one), technology (the obvious driver being the people who want to sell the solutions), and an eclectic collection of "teach students how to think" hogwash (yeah, nice idea, but it's all just mother-love statements) pushed by academia. I guess I should back off a little from my assertion. Yes, sociologists do ditch bad theories, eventually. But there's a lot of random noise, and the time it takes them to adjust their theories means that the slight signal from good studies tends to be downed out by noise. Yes, I really think you could convince people that culture is unchanged for 500,000 years. But you'd need a good sales pitch. Here's the skeleton: * Culture has remained unchanged for 500,000 years. * If this is true, then it's a moral imperative that people believe this. Finding a decent excuse for the first part is easy enough. Wave your hands a bit, redefine culture, and find a few examples of things that haven't changed too much. The second bit is harder, because your proposal is a little boring. A good lie is like a perpetual motion machine - it can keep itself going. I suppose you could argue that exceptionalism - the myth that our culture is fundamentally different, is the cause of a great many travesties. So, all cultures are fundamentally the same, bar some insignificant surface differences. One of the few big differences (and it's been this way for 500,000 years) between them has been whether they considered themselves special or not (and the cultures which considered themselves special all did horrible things). The next step is trying to tar-pit people with some kind of paradox - is it OK to consider your culture special, on the basis that it's one of the cultures that doesn't consider itself to be special? But just be a little sneaky with this bit - you don't want people to catch on.