Educational Equality: an ideal?

Taken together, the pieces we read this week do not bode well for the future of our country. Our education system, that creates a sense of "monitoring and punishment" (Lipman 161) in our teachers and "uncritical habits of thought" (Lipman 171) in our students, is creating a sort of "educational inflation" (Campbell) that is making higher levels of education necessary but probably ineffective in creating more politically active citizens (Kam and Palmer 624). So what are we to do?

Although equality in education is often thought of as an ideal--for a more educated citizenry supposedly makes for better democracy, I'm wondering now if maybe this isn't the case. Perhaps our efforts to create a minimum standard-of-learning does an injustice to the health of our nation. As Campbell points out, education is experiencing a "cheapening" (although we can only dream that he means in the monetary sense...), in that a college degree does not have as much value as it did a decade ago. While the ideal to give everyone a college education seems, on its face, to promote higher expectations of learning for all, steps towards this ideal may have in fact reduced actual expectations, by making a college degree easier to attain. Similarly, NCLB has tried to standardize education on the primary level, which has only worked to exacerbate the problems of educational inequalities, rather than alleviate them. Do these studies then give support to a purposefully unequal education system, where it's okay for some children to be left behind, and that not everyone should get a college degree?

What is missing from all of these readings is a proposed solution to these problems. If the current trends and policies are leading the country in a dangerous direction, how are we to stop them? Perhaps the ideal of educational equality should be reconsidered.