The present political climate and new social agendas for education deserve more critical meditation than they usually receive at professional meetings and in scholarly journals. For, unless we think that the conditions for teaching and for making rhetoric are immutable over the centuries since Plato and Aristotle theorized these activities, or unless we think that conditions change but education and rhetoric stand apart from history, how can those who teach and think about rhetoric plan and understand our work without an assessment ofits role in the social process-including a particular society's political climate and agenda for education? I offer no fruits of specialist research or new theory, just my efforts as an intellectual and citizen to locate our professional work on a historical map of its context. To do that, I decided, out of infinitely many possibilities, to scan the doings and sayings of Mr. Bush and his associates on education and culture to see how they articulate the tremendously appealing slogan, repeated dozens of times since Mr. Bush's acceptance of his party's nomination, "a kinder, gentler nation." What does he take to be its deficits in kindness? How does he propose to amend them in the arena of education? What rhetoric do he and his speechwriters use to explain this administration's projects? This approach would show how political authority construes and constructs our situation, and later I will address that subject. But first, the final phrase in my title calls for some independent construal of that situation, against which to measure the project of our national leadership. What is the "Bush era," apart from what Mr. Bush says it is? As a dissident intellectual, I would have no difficulty laying out such a vision, and you know in advance pretty much what it is. To relate it to our present concerns, however, I decided to anchor it in a collage of facts: the news; first, because the news is what most of us use to read the era we live in; second, because the news comes at us in a disjointed form highly characteristic of public discourse in this era; and third, because, in myview, any serious proposal for education, rhetorical education in particular, would have to address the task ordinary citizens face in resolving collages of news into pictures of our historical moment that can guide writing and other action within and beyond it
