This essay targets concepts and practices that have become embedded in the discourse around teaching, learning, and schooling. It raises questions about the degree to which commercialism has infected our thinking about education, thus reducing inquiry to procedural routines and deadening rituals of marketing. Via “playful provocation,” multiple illustrations of corporate encroachment are offered to show the perverse degree to which economic jargon infects US thinking when it comes to the education policy and practice. The hegemonic result is a kind of reductionism that denies the often-messy elements necessary in and for human inquiry. I offer an interpretation of critical transitivity to challenge the repressiveness of rubrics, standardization, and the exploitation of children. I argue that we should embrace critical transitivity because it emerges from the various and intricate transactions between and among people willing to be wrong, willing to set aside deeply engrained and long-held traditions, willing to achieve what the Greeks called elenchus: refutation. I advance of vision of schools as democratic counter-public spaces where student and teacher inquiry is supportively antagonistic: where teachers, administrators, counselors, students, and so on, understand and enact philosophy for education.