I've been mulling over Gen. Clark's comments about education in his interview with Josh Marshall.

For example, take the idea of competition in schools. OK now, what is competition in schools? What does it really mean? Well, competition in business means you have somebody who's in a business that has a profit motive in it. It's measured every quarter. If the business doesn't keep up, the business is going to lose revenue, therefore it has an incentive to restructure, reorganize, re-plan, re-compete and stay in business.

Schools aren't businesses. Schools are institutions of public service. Their job--their product--is not measured in terms of revenues gained. It's measured in terms of young lives whose potential can be realized. And you don't measure that either in terms of popularity of the school, or in terms of the standardized test scores in the school. You measure it child-by-child, in the interaction of the child with the teacher, the parent with the teacher, and the child in a larger environment later on in life.

So when people say that competition is-this is sort of sloganeering, "Hey, you know, schools need this competition." No. I've challenged people: Tell me why it is that competition would improve a school. Most of them can't explain it. It's just like, "Well, competition improves everything so therefore it must improve schools."

If you want to improve schools, you've got to go inside the processes that make a school great.

My first reaction was: Great, someone is finally articulating that there is a significant difference between running a business and running a government. The goals, agendas, and processes are so different. Lessons learned in business are not necessarily transferrable to government administration. Take a look at Bloomberg. He's been a very successful entrepreneur and businessman, but he's finding that command-and-control doesn't work that well in City Hall. Consensus building is a different animal, and he's been struggling. (And the same can be said about Clark -- an operations guy getting into a policy arena.)

But Clark's words kept rumbling in the back of my head, and the nagging finally became clear. As with many others (this author, at times, included), the General decided to throw the baby out with the bath water. There is nothing wrong with competition in schools. There's nothing wrong with students competing with themselves and with others; and there's nothing wrong with schools competing against each other because competition, in the end, is just another word for striving to be better, and that is what education is supposed to be all about. It would be better stated that the goals and methods of business competition aren't those of education, and then enunciate what the goals of education in this country should be. And that's something that isn't talked about a lot, other than getting as many kids as possible into the next grade level.

To understand the rules of this competition, we need to determine what are the goals of American education. First off, I think we need to acknowledge that there are two educational tracks. There is the one track for the ruling elite, where only the select are initiated into the secrets of how to work the levers of power. The second track is vocational, where the rest learn how to work. These days, it is the difference between priest and laity, executives and managers, generals and colonels. In more hidebound societies, this reinforces the divisions of class. The wonder of America (obvious nepotism aside) is that the boundary layer between classes is so permeable.

When we talk about education in America, we aren't talking about the elite track -- it will take care of itself, as it always has. We are talking about the vocational track. Public education gained widespread acceptance in this country in great part because the new industrial workplace required a certain level of literacy. Instructions had to be read. Reports had to be written. Direct transmission of traditional skill from master to apprentice no longer sufficiently prepared a worker. The machines of progress were doing the traditional tasks faster and, to a certain degree, better. Workers needed tools to adapt to innovation in the workplace, and those tools were reading, riting, and rithmetic.

I don't know where we are going with all this. We are in the midst of another upheaval. Industrialsm is waning, and something else is ascendant. It's computers and bioengineering and nanoscience, and I don't have a clear picture of what this means for our future, much less what these technologies will do to our societies and cultures. But I do know that retreating into a womb of "empowerment" and "creativity" is not a solution.