The More Things Stay the Same

Change is often slow and incremental. And sometimes it's just plain non-existent. Such is the case with public education reform, as illustrated by Andrew Draper's lament in his 1909 tome on American Education (p. 279):

We've been discussing the overloaded classroom curriculum and its negative impact on learning for more than 100 years - five generations, and all we've managed to accomplish is to load up our public schools with even more requirements!  Instead of resolving this complex problem once and for all, we choose to be distracted by the so-called reformers who want to blame our system's faults on the teachers.