The paper traces the developments taking place in the sphere of education as a direct fall out of larger socio-economic and political developments. It bases its arguments in the tradition of Western educationists who, in different ways, have tried to analyse education in relation to the social relations characterising a society and who see education as an instrument of reproducing the existing ‘realities’. Deriving from the experiences of education in USA primarily it argues that trends towards standardisation and high-stakes testing cannot stand outside the social context. They are primarily constructs of capital and one of the challenges today is to see how rational knowledge is constructed. And in order to understand this construction, one needs to see how knowledge moves from what appears to be, to what is, or from appearance to essence, sometimes unmasking deception, sometimes simply deepening understanding. It is in this context that he sees schools as the central organising places of North American life. The paper defines notions of ‘courage’ and ‘change’ in context of schooling and education and concludes that changing minds is the daily life of every school worker.
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