Education appears to be in a perpetual crisis. In this article, I suggest that one of the key contributing factors in educational crisis is the institution of schooling, which re/produces the failures to learn and, thereby, contributes to the re/production of inequities that it (schooling) is supposed to overcome. Ideologies and practices intended to bring about equity through schooling re/produce societal inequity. I show how activity theory allows us to understand that the origin of inequities lies in societal relations, which are relations of ruling. The implications are that a real change of schooling does not come from this or that curricular change but in a reformation of schooling as societal activity generally and science and mathematics education specifically. In ending, I suggest using the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric care as a model for rethinking schooling. Thus, as Bazzul (this issue), I make the beginning of a plaidoyer for redrawing the lines of society by rethinking the very institution of schooling rather than its curriculum contents and practices.