Education

It is not coincidental that the concerted effort by government authorities to gain monopoly control over the curriculum arrives at the time that social movements have appeared and are challenging male, white Anglo-European political and cultural supremacy. The formerly enslaved, colonized, and oppressed do not accept their ascribed cultural, racial, and gender inferiority. Many are asserting their rights to reclaim cultural power, and to create and forge their own cultural and social identities.

For those who see these movements as cultural balkanization and a threat to social order, standardization and centralization of curriculum and testing serve both as an antidote to the demand for greater cultural diversity and as a way to manufacture consent and maintain the dominant culture. They serve to reduce what they perceive as a threat: multiculturalists, anti-racists, feminists, and others whom they fear are sowing seeds of disunity, threatening the fabric of the nation.
- Harold Berlak