Advocates of progressive education had long rejected rote learning, seeing it as not only authoritarian but also ineffective. Now they feared the new focus on math and science might exacerbate the problem. At the same time, even some tech-focused reformers were now wary of the problem of static thinking, and so it was that the progressive animosity

The postmodern ethos, which has been so influential in the arts, encourages a playful, ironic scepticism of any absolutes or certainty, let alone any sense that history might have a meaning or direction.

“Embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence, and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it