In this essay, the authors propose that there are certain psychoanalytic insights, at the intersection of the clinical and of critical social theory, which become crucial at precisely the point of recognizing the hidden curriculum. They contend that it is at this point that a political actor, and an educator or educational theorist interested in radical transformation, must seek to "act" in ways which do not appeal directly to the dominant order, do not insist that it make certain accommodations in the name of Justice or any other noble aim; the site of transformative resistance lies elsewhere. The authors state that, while society pretends that schools will be able to accomplish a noble aim such as the elimination of poverty through educational policies that blame and punish those schools and teachers whose work does not pass muster, society fails to acknowledge that no amount of raising test scores can ever eliminate poverty and unfair privilege and privation to an entire socioeconomic class. Amongst other considerations, the authors also assert that society must be able to contemplate whether the current dominant social order of global capitalism can ever deliver an emancipatory outcome for humanity, and whether any and all efforts at educational policy reform within this system ultimately and most crucially amount to an unwitting maintenance of the very system which structurally can do no more that oppress in the ways it states it wishes to resolve. (Contains 29 footnotes.)