Cycles of Disruptive Fixation
This chapter examines the emergence of the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology within the context of historical cycles of purportedly disruptive educational reform in the United States. It considers how reformers' inability to remedy the social and political problems with which education has repeatedly and increasingly been tasked—which reformers also recurrently promise to fix—help produce conditions in which both crises in education and calls for disruptive remedies can recurrently arise. Against this historical backdrop, the chapter shows how particular cycles of disruptive fixation occurred as the Downtown School's designers and reformers responded to calls for disruption by engaging in problematization and rendering technical processes.