This article presents the author's critiques on Jim Garrison's essay and focuses on Garrison's concerns about the affronts posed to democracy by the standardization and accountability regimes in education. He rightfully highlights a few critical ways by which standardization and accountability in education reflect and reinforce antidemocratic tendencies associated with the colonization of the life-world by systems-world thinking (Garrison 2012). For Garrison, processes associated with standardization in education seem to pose a potent threat to individuality, while redefining and exacerbating inequality. In the least, these processes, in education and their iterations in the wider society more generally, have clearly redefined dominant assumptions about the causes of, and thusly delimited "viable" responses to, contemporary inequalities--hence the endless siren song of more "accountability" and "privatization" of both public goods and social issues (and less autonomy and responsibility), even under the "Change and Hope" presidential administration. To provide theoretical grounds for opposing standardization in education and revitalizing the democratic mission of public schools, Garrison draws insight from John Dewey's work on individuality and critiques of early to mid-twentieth-century administrative and testing practices, and this source of insight is both the potential strength and limitation of his argument. In closing, the author shares Garrison's concern for the threats posed by standardization and accountability to public schools and a creative democracy.