After two decades of futile escalation, the so-called "War on Drugs" has failed miserably in its avowed mission to stop the flow of addictive chemicals into the bloodstreams of our young people. Paramilitary-style policing, longer sentences for drug convictions, and fear-based drug prevention programs have done little to reduce substance abuse by American youth.

Likewise, the emerging War on Education will fail miserably in its avowed mission to halt the growing irrelevance and inequity in school systems across our nation. Higher academic standards, the proliferation of standardized tests, and threats to schools that don't measure up will do little to reduce the cognitive and emotional damage suffered by American students on a daily basis.

Why? Perhaps actor Michael Douglas, playing the newly appointed head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in the movie "Traffic," summed it up best at the close of his aborted speech to the Washington news media. "No one ever wins when we make war on our own families," and with that he fled a stunned press conference and a job that required him to address a complex human problem only with repressive, get-tough tactics that ultimately blame rather than help the victim.

And so it goes today with American educational policy, where we are heading ever farther in the direction of cracking down on students, teachers, and administrators in order to improve the quality of schools that are only marginally under their control in the first place.

It's yet another of the centuries-old myths of education, this one the misbegotten notion that learning requires pushing and prodding, management and regimentation and, of course, the ceaseless measurement and ranking of outcomes. It's the next logical step for an institution that has yet to organize itself according to the ways in which children actually learn and grow.

Last fall I exchanged a series of e-mails with a young teacher from Austin, Texas. Clayton Stromberger, along with all of the other teachers and the principal in an inner-city middle school in the capital of the Lone Star State, was fired after the school failed to meet then-Governor George W. Bush's new standards for school performance. Thankfully, Clayton left behind a record of the year he spent there. It is the moving story, published in the Sunday magazine of the Austin daily newspaper, of a young English teacher awakening students, with a history of academic and behavioral problems, to the beauty of Shakespeare and the power of written self-expression. He helped well over a hundred students discover that they are indeed capable learners, and in return, when the school as a whole scored below Bush's cutoff on end-of-the-year high stakes tests - which have caused the minority dropout rate in the state to exceed 50% since their inception in 1990 - Clayton was told to look for another job.

Delving deeper into the myths of education involves exploring such dark places, but we promise not to leave you stranded there. A great many of the pages to follow will be devoted not to a depressing analysis of the problem, but rather to the efforts of individuals and groups around the country who listened to the little boy when he shouted out the truth everyone else was afraid to admit - that the (education) emperor is wearing no clothes.

May reading this issue spur you to consider what you might do to turn the myths of education into the reality of helping young people flourish - intellectually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. They are indeed our future.

Chris Mercogliano