Theme public education in the newspapers these days, whenever T hesuchnewsnewsabout is provided, isn't very encouraging. Drift pervades most of it drift and loss: the downward drift of scores, the loss of standards; the upward drift of violence, the loss of order. Even those occasional upbeat pieces that suggest the schools have helped shape some lives in a positive way manage only to reinforce the sickness at heart, as when the New York Times recently ran two stories, side by side, about two teachers, one in his late 70s and long retired and being celebrated by celebrated former students at a reunion, the other about to retire, being remembered as a source of inspiration. Two pieces of nostalgia to underline how far we have come from better days. Why does it seem so much easier to bestow praise on activities that are located in the past without, it might be added, wondering about the ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living - and so difficult to acknowledge the accomplishments and meaning of particular activities in the present? In the paranoid style of the day, aided by some reading in history, I wonder if this isn't one more instance of our being prepared not so much to think well of what has passed, but simply to think of the past and not of the present, and to think of the past in a particular way, nostalgically, selectively, scaled down, unconnected to the present, as if it had been a given, just as when no attempt is made to connect the present to the past, as if it, too, is a given, not subject to questions of the deepest concern, or open to other experiences. This process came home in another way the other day at a meeting in Washington called by the North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation to discuss the question of a moratorium on the practice of group-administered standardized testing of young children. The meeting brought together critics of the tests and representatives of the publishing companies responsible for making (but not administering) the tests. The question put to the publishers at one point was, "Could anyone say anything to justify standardized testing?" Only one publisher offered to do so. What he said was simple enough, but it carried power beyond its simplicity because of all the unquestioned assumptions that stood behind it. "The tests are justified," he said, "because we have a competitive society." In other words, whether he intended that meaning or not, he was saying that the problem wasn't tests that are arbitrary (at best), but a competitive society that requires such tests. For him, the matter rested there. But isn't the confidence of such reasoning dependent on being able to dismiss the experience of 75 years of this century, during which the politics of the world have already been changed beyond recognition in any earlier terms, developments in industry and technology have raised expectations, in the world as a whole, to unforeseen heights, and a cultural revolution has deepened the aspiration to extend the active process of learning, with the skills of literacy and other advanced communications, to all people rather than to limited groups? Isn't such reasoning tied to bein~ able to identify the active processes of restlessness and uncertainty as drift and loss instead of the tension created by the struggle for democracy, the development of industry, the extension of communications, and the deep social and personal changes that are affecting all of us. And isn't such reasoning possible because it fails to acknowledge the active questioning and practice that is a large part of our most significant experience? Arthur Tobier