"The trouble with debates about public education in the United States is that they rarely have anything to do with education—let alone establishing the habits of analytical thinking and civic engagement that give us the freedom to be more than just cogs in the machinery of corporate America. For the most part, in recent years, education debates at the national level and in communities across this country have been proxy wars for right-wing strategists who see schools as vehicles to advance their divide-and-conquer agenda. Cynical Republicans like Florida governor Ron DeSantis want to argue about whether students and teachers should be required to wear masks during a pandemic, about whether LGBTQ kids should be treated with respect, about whether educators should be allowed to teach the actual history of the United States—as opposed to a truncated version in which fundamental issues are ignored and critical thinking is disregarded. Amid all the political infighting over mask mandates and Critical Race Theory, about test scores and funding mechanisms, we've losing our focus on what matters most in education; the encouragement of students to explore big ideas, to learn how to assess what makes sense and what does not, to become engaged and active citizens who live happy and fulfilling lives. For education to get focused on the real needs, and the real possibilities for students in the twenty-first century, we have to break out the mentality that considers our elementary and secondary schools merely training grounds for workers."