The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. The usual two guests today, first imminently is Christos Sims, who looks at the long history of American educational reform through the case study of a Manhattan

middle school. And at the bottom of the hour, Christian Parenti examines the threat presented by climate change

to coastal cities where most of the world's economic and cultural activity happens.

First, school reform, as we'll hear from Christo Sims is a long tradition in the U.S. going

back to the 19th century of looking to the schools to solve our social problems that somehow if we got

education right everything else in society would fall into place.

The latest iteration of this hearty perennial, which is getting kind of old by now, is that tech will save us, though from what I hear, some Silicon Valley execs like to send their kids to Waldorf schools where computers are forbidden.

Sims spent several years studying a new public middle school in Manhattan, one that was

showered the elite foundation cash from birth. Its pedagogical philosophy is a curious one. The

curriculum is organized in the model of video games.

Students study ancient Greece by pretending their spies in the Peloponnesian War,

make up a game to save an imaginary town from environmental disaster.

Some of this sounds like the classic project-based approach of progressive education, but with

a high-tech overlay.

Turns out, though, the Convention quickly reasserts itself, contrary to the wishes of its

founders.

Krista Sims, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California

San Diego, writes up the story in his new book, Disruptive Fixation,

School Reform in the Pitfalls of Techno techno idealism, published by Princeton University Press.

Christo Sims.

There's a long tradition in American education of trying to fix the society's problems through the schools, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

...