OCR Text |
Show ITT fTflrTlXrikMH WoWlfMI Socializing Americans: School and Communify Editor's Notei This Is the fifteenth In a series of 18 articles exploring Issues of the American Issues Forum. This series has been written especially especi-ally for the second segment of the Bicentennial program of Courses by Newspaper. COURSES BY NEWSPAPER NEWSPAP-ER was developed by the University of California Extension, Exten-sion, San Diego, and funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Humani-ties. Copyright c 1976 by the Regents of the University of California. By Neil Harris Americans from the beginning begin-ning have generally valued education for its intensely practical benefits. Even in the colonial days proponents of education demanded that it serve some useful purpose. The Puritan leaders of Massachusetts (the first colony colo-ny in the New World to legislate a public education program) compared the ignorant ignor-ant man to a scabby sheep who might infect the whole flock. Educated men, on the other hand, would be more likely to resist the wiles of Satan, "the old Deluder." Harvard University Uni-versity was founded in 1636, for example, to provide a constant supply of educated ministers-men who could be depended on to counteract the moral slackness of wilderness life. Outside of New England, however, public education made few advances before the 19th century. And even in New England private fees rather than public aid supported many schools. This was possible because schooling had not yet become synonymous synony-mous with education. The family and apprenticeship supplied many educational needs, while most colonists worked at farming, which required no formal instruction. the American Revolution suggested new directions for schools as well as churches. A number of Americans, among them Jefferson' and' Noah Webster, pleaded for expanded expand-ed state support, partly to ferret out the gifted and virtuous who would make up a republican ruling class. Jefferson's Jeffer-son's educational scheme, covering a complex system that moved from infant schools to college training, failed to receive the support of the Commonwealth of Virginia because the expense seemed too great. Good public schools cost money, and the lack of it remained a stumbling block for many years. School reformers reform-ers appealed to both the fears and hopes of reluctant taxpayers taxpay-ers in their campaigns for public support. Horace Mann, who became secretary to the first Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837 (and remained re-mained for more than ten years) insisted that effective education was the best guarantee guar-antee of social safety, as well as of personal fulfillment. Republican institutions he wrote in the 1830s, multiply temptations and quicken passions. pas-sions. "We must not add to the impulsive, without also adding to the regulating forces," he concluded, and compulsory school attendance, together with a state administered adminis-tered system of training teachers, seemed indispensable indispens-able to curb the dangerous passions of the American electorate. Justifying the Schools Like the family, schools could be justified as institutions institu-tions that enabled ambitious youngsters to adapt to the competitive economic world, and that taught them to resist the pull of undesirable but popular social habits. Educational Educa-tional reformers veered rhetorically rhetor-ically back and forth. On the one hand, educational training promoted skills that would assure economic independence. independ-ence. Personal wealth, social standing, emotional maturity, it was argued, all rested upon a solid footing in language, literature, logic, and mathematics. mathe-matics. On the other hand, education would counteract the economic, political, and religious delusions that constantly con-stantly threatened democratic society. Education in this sense was critical of the culture rather than simply adaptive. To be sure, the skills it developed had universal application-in the coutinghouse as well as the library-but it could also be defended on the grounds that such skills had broader value. Having confronted and absorbed ab-sorbed the best products of the' human mind, young Americans Ameri-cans would learn to demand higher standards of their politicians, their poets, their philosophers and their architects. archi-tects. The Failure of the Schools By the late 19th century, however, public education seemed fo be doing little to promote either resistance or adaptation to society. The .functions once performed by the family or the guild had largely disappeared, and the schools had not taken up the slack. Progressive educators, led by John Dewey, G. Stanley Hall, and Francis Parker, attributed the failure to a blind allegiance to outworn formal methods. The overcrowded, often unsanitary schools, with teachers who taught by methods meth-ods of memorization and recitation, did not prepare the children for the world of industry and cities that awaited await-ed them. Schools broke the continuity of the individual life cycle; they once had aided movement from one stage to another. School work seemed artificial" and incomprehensible to young students. They had no preparation for later responsibilities. responsi-bilities. The school should be neither a refuge nor an asylum, reformers argued. Instead it should be a miniature reconstruction of the world outside, employing common com-mon objects and experiences and emphasizing the collective social skills that would aid adjustment to the factory, the urban neighborhood, the mass audience, and the other social groups becoming common in the 20th century. Aided by insights drawn from contemporary psychologists, psycholo-gists, reformers condemned an authoritarianism that was as out of place in the school room as it was in politics. A curriculum based on the child's needs meant respecting respect-ing the child's individuality and encouraging him to make decisions based upon his own judgment and experience. An education which upheld the unquestioned authority of the teacher did not produce good citizens. A specific body of knowledge was less important to citizenship than a socially useful set of attitudes and expectations. The philosophy of adaptation adapta-tion has dominated 20th century experiments in American Ameri-can education. But inevitably, as school systems have grown larger and equipment more costly, bureaucratic necessity and economic constraints have dulled the sharp edge of earlier hopes. Even during periods of considerable social discontent and economic reversal, re-versal, schools have been expected somehow to function smoothly and successfully, to prepare the young for entry into real society and at the same time to be independent of larger social problems. Increasingly, as they have grown larger, high schools and colleges have become communities com-munities of thier own. Through sports, fraternities and societies, student government, govern-ment, clubs, they have transmitted trans-mitted values and practices more effectively than in the classroom. Nevertheless larger attention atten-tion continues to focus upon formal instruction. Textbooks, teaching methods, Bible reading, read-ing, sex education, 'subversive' 'subver-sive' materials, have all aroused the ire of interested citizens. Because schools are invested with so much responsibility re-sponsibility for the maintenance mainten-ance of social order, they continue to be the crucial and contradictory symbol, both of desires for mobility and, at the same time, of an old order of things requiring protection. The Schools and Social Reform This is most clear in the debates over racial justice. The twenty years since Brown vs. Board of Education have witnessed great progress and prolonged bickering, as deseg. regation has proceeded. The schools symbolize the problem which 18th century Americans wrestled with, and hoped they had sovled through the Consti-tution Consti-tution and the Bill of Rights. In a government founded on popular sovereignty, what happens when majority will clashes with inalienable rights? Are schools to carry out the vision of the local community, or the principles embedded in our notion of natural rights? In other words are schools to adapt to prevailing social circumstances, circumstan-ces, or are they to criticize and try to change inequitable arrangements? The issues are complex. The school is once again seen as a weapon to construct a new and different society. Witness the current agony over court-ordered court-ordered bussing in urban school systems. The school can become once more an asylum not an intellectual asylum to project traditional knowledge, but a social asylum, a microcosm of ideal rather than of existing contemporary social so-cial conditions. Increasingly, as the historian, histor-ian, Rowland Berthoff has observed, modern American schools are assuming the position of an established Church; their monopoly is justified by the fundamental tasks they perform and their relationship to' social peace. But just as issues of belief and organization plagued the older churches, so the modern school is challenged by dissenters dis-senters who argue that salvation salva-tion can be reached by many roads, and that toleration -.-through tax support is the best way of ensuring harmony and progress. For so long a symbol of democratic society, the public school is now being challenged by proponents of voucher systems who argue that a return to competition and private management may be the solution to social as well as educational problems. Americans have historically emphasized the service functions func-tions of education, but we may be witnessing the beginnings of a basic alteration in our attitudes." It remains to be seen whether public education can continue to provide an article of faith for the nation. r -r.ic |