This just in:

Sorry kids, President Obama wants to extend the school year by a month. Students in China, India and other fast-growing countries are already leaving U.S. students in the dust, he said. "They have caught up and now in some cases have surpassed us," he said.

Now I don't pretend to know the real reason for this brutal attempt to expropriate what little liberty and leisure kids have left -- apart from the general institutional impulse toward aggrandizement, hypertrophy, and metastasis.

(Ivan Illich forty years ago noticed "the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes". Personally, I like to use the English translation of 'pedagogue', namely 'boy-herder'. Perhaps we should coin 'childherd' for the sake of gender neutrality, on the analogy of 'shepherd', and pronounce to rhyme with 'filtered'.)

What is clear is that the claimed purpose of this sadistic initiative -- "competition" with peonage economies like India and China -- is incoherent. Taken seriously, it means that the "race to the top" is really a race to the bottom. The "competition" is a struggle to discover who can take his hide to market most cheaply, and the prize, of course -- to borrow a trope from the Old Man -- is a hiding.

The ideological triumph of the childherd does, alas, appear to be nearly complete. The same Daily News story quoted above ran a poll:

Should U.S. schools extend the school year by a month? Yes, it will help American students compete with their Chinese and other counterparts.

No, the kids need a break and it could turn them off to learning.

It depends on what exactly they'd be doing for that month.

Note the claustrophobically buttoned-up -- or rather, locked-down -- universe of discourse here. Even opposition to expanding the school year must be expressed in instrumental terms, and moreover, in terms of facilitating the childherd's ostensible mission. No other considerations can be admitted.

Speaking of Ivan Illich, everybody ought to read "Deschooling Society," which can be had online. Sample: