The Rise and Fall of Public Education in America
The Interdependence of Public Education and Society
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Public education is experiencing a critical erosion of public support. It is being bad mouthed from all directions. The school prayer movement - fervently espoused by its advocates, who apparently really believe that a moment of prayer each morning will somehow restore moral values throughout the nation - is in truth just an attack on the separation of church and state. The voucher movement is nothing more - and nothing less - than a vigorous attempt to get public support for private and parochial schools. The accelerated increase in home schooling is yet another manifestation of a vague yet widespread feeling that something is wrong with the nation's schools, but an inability to diagnose just what that "something" is. Since World War II America has experienced social and economic changes that are explosive -changes in technology, changes in demography, changes in values, changes in the nature of jobs, changes in income distribution, just to name a few. These changes are having an effect of almost indescribable magnitude on all aspects of the human condition, including public education. So far as education is concerned, these changes require enormous conceptual changes in the goals, as well as in the implementation of the goals, of public education. This condition has been going on ever since the end of World War II. But now that we have crossed the threshold of the twenty first century the problems facing our schools are accelerating geometrically. The enormous impact of the technological and the informational revolutions on the economy and on societal values, and the resultant changes in social relationships and in the number and nature of jobs, requires all school to substantially increase, as well as upgrade, their programs and services in order to solve these problems. In meeting that requirement the schools need - and deserve -widespread participation and support from parents, taxpayers, government officials, business and labor,and the general public. To obtain that kind of public participation and support, the educational and political leadership at all levels must provide intelligent and understandable analyses of the unresolved problems and the newly-emerging problems of public education, and what is required to solve them. The goal of this book is to contribute to that noble effort.
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About the Book
For more than forty years the author has written numerous magazine articles and made countless public speeches citing his three basic principles of education: 1) that public education and the larger society are interdependent - what happens to one affects the other; 2) that when a society decides to provide a certain level of education to all of a given segment of its population, that better educated group soon begins to create so many inventions and so many better ways of doing things that still more education must be provided young people to equip them to deal with this new complexity; and 3) that when education and the larger society get out of sync, unless steps are promptly taken to get them back in sync by providing much MORE education to enable people to cope with the more complex society, then both education and the larger society begin to deteriorate.
This writing and lecturing experience showed the author clearly that people resist conceptual change. Someone once said that people, and particularly Americans, resist change until change becomes irresistible. This fact, plus the rapidly deteriorating condition of both public education and American society, has led the author to publish this book in the hope of getting large numbers of people to understand the absolute necessity of almost immediately starting public education at the age of two, operating the public schools year round, and providing higher education to all interested people free of charge.
About the Author
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