"If we practiced medicine like we practice education, we'd look for the liver on the right side and left side in alternate years"
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Education is the only major public system where inconsistency gets repackaged as “innovation” instead of malpractice. Kazin’s line lands because it yokes schooling to the one arena where people still expect grounded expertise: medicine. The image is absurd on purpose - a doctor hunting for the liver on alternate sides of the body - but the joke has teeth. It suggests a profession so untethered from evidence that it cycles through fashions, not findings, and treats each new cohort of students as the next trial run.
Kazin, a critic who spent his life reading American culture against its own self-mythology, is targeting the churn: curricula rewritten, pedagogies rebranded, standards swapped, tests redesigned. In his era, mid-century schooling was being pulled between progressive “child-centered” movements and back-to-basics reactions; later decades would add the administrative obsession with measurement and accountability. His point isn’t that education should be mechanistic like medicine, but that it should be as allergic to capriciousness as medicine is. Learning involves complexity and values; anatomy doesn’t. That’s why the analogy stings: it exposes how often educational policy pretends uncertainty is inevitable when, in practice, much of the chaos is political, bureaucratic, or market-driven.
The subtext is a moral indictment. Kids don’t get to opt out of experiments imposed by adults who face few consequences for failure. Kazin’s wit makes the critique shareable; the cynicism makes it hard to shrug off.
Kazin, a critic who spent his life reading American culture against its own self-mythology, is targeting the churn: curricula rewritten, pedagogies rebranded, standards swapped, tests redesigned. In his era, mid-century schooling was being pulled between progressive “child-centered” movements and back-to-basics reactions; later decades would add the administrative obsession with measurement and accountability. His point isn’t that education should be mechanistic like medicine, but that it should be as allergic to capriciousness as medicine is. Learning involves complexity and values; anatomy doesn’t. That’s why the analogy stings: it exposes how often educational policy pretends uncertainty is inevitable when, in practice, much of the chaos is political, bureaucratic, or market-driven.
The subtext is a moral indictment. Kids don’t get to opt out of experiments imposed by adults who face few consequences for failure. Kazin’s wit makes the critique shareable; the cynicism makes it hard to shrug off.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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