More than 20,000 teachers pushed into the building, leaving 4,000 more to mill about outside, all protesting against the Ontario government's package of education reforms, known as Bill 160 -- a piece of legislation apparently so horrible as to justify the teachers, or rather "angry teachers," in an illegal strike.

Granted, 20,000 teachers chanting "we won't back down" makes a stirring spectacle. But if ever you wanted a symbol of what's wrong with the public school system, it is the sight of 20,000 teachers gathered together in one place.

That it is even possible to round up such a mob is indictment enough.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of history it was decided to set up the school system on the heavy industry model -- an incomprehensibly huge monopoly, with dozens of subsidiaries, mere mammoths, called "school boards," who in turn control virtually everything that goes on in those massive stone blocks we have come to know as schools. And into these we feed our children.

To run such a sprawling, complex organization requires a long chain of command, stretching all the way from the minister of Education to the lowliest teacher. For low is the place of the teacher in such a scheme -- low, that is, unless the teacher combines his efforts with thousands like him. The infrastructure, in short, conditions the superstructure, as Marx could have told you: the industrial structure of the modern school system will tend to produce a certain kind of teacher, with a certain view of the world: the kind that turns up at a hockey arena for a night of partisan screaming.

For as much as the teacher learns he is powerless as an individual, he discovers he is all powerful as part of the group. His employer, the school board ostensibly, but ultimately the province, is only vaguely answerable to parents, and disinclined in any event to stare down a union, such as the Ontario Teachers Federation, with 126,000 members and the power, as the union's president bragged to the rally, to see that "every school in this province will be shut down." And so in time everyone involved comes to see the system as being run in the interests of those who work in it -- teachers, bureaucrats, school trustees -- as opposed to, say, students. Or rather, they come to identify their own needs with the needs of students, and to presume that what is good for the former must be best for the latter. There is nothing rude or shocking in saying this. The same phenomenon of "provider capture" can be observed wherever monopoly arises, from the post office to Ontario Hydro to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. Their employees never see their monopoly privileges as an unjust and unproductive aberration, but as an entitlement, which they do not blush to insist the public should preserve.

Add to this the ever-present "tyranny of the status quo," the blind belief in the divine rightness of whatever is currently the case, and you have the reason it is possible to persuade thousands of Ontario teachers that they have been monstrously ill-treated in being limited to the same time to prepare for class as is the norm in every other province, among Bill 160's other indignities.

Then there is the matter of the chanting. If you have ever tried to shout a slogan, and if you have even a modicum of self-respect, you will know that it is an extremely difficult thing to do, at least with a straight face. It is impossible, indeed, without temporarily disabling your mind. The teachers who could chant "we won't back down" over and over for hours on end, the teachers the present system has produced, are people who are capable of putting their brains on hold -- who consider it good and right to do so, what is more, in the service of a cause. It is a little disquieting to know that these are also the people to whom we have entrusted the teaching of our children.

It would be nice to report that this Stalinist system was about to change in some fundamental way. But the changes the province's education minister proposes amount to the reforms of a Gorbachev -- fewer vodka rations all round -- when what is needed is a Yeltsin-style revolution. Given the unions' readiness to go to the wall over issues like prep time, it seems clear the government would have incurred no more political risk in proposing real reforms: instead of fewer, bigger school boards, for example, abolishing boards altogether, making each school an independent unit, accountable directly to parents and managed by a principal with real management powers.

After all this time, after so many run-ins with its public-sector employees, you would think the government would have taken one lesson to heart: in for a penny, in for a pound.