Silly me. Many of the current reforms in education aim to turn the schoolhouse into that plastic-products factory. Our machines are not hydraulic, but they are mechanical; textbooks, curricular frameworks, and approved book lists are the same from Swampscott to San Francisco. The machinery heats and molds our children, then stamps, bags, and packages them to a professional uniformity. The SAT and its related bubble tests perform quality control. Once a year, I check the green Scantron sheets and see that our students are missing a few points on pronoun agreement. I adjust the machine accordingly.

For our students, the factory floor is a dangerous place to grow up. As the books and tests we use become more refined and ubiquitous, our students become more reduced and uniform. The textbook they memorize at age 16 is out of date by the time they are 20. The answers they recite in their senior year become trivia questions before they finish college. Our plastic students will be with us for a long time: My swizzle sticks still exist, but they fill a landfill or float in a Texas-sized island of plastic. They don’t accomplish anything.