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Who Will Educate the Educators?
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10516 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1986 |
2,216 Words |
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George C.S. Benson and John West, Jr.
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THE TROUBLED CRUSADE
American Education 1945-1980
Diane Ravitch
New York: Basic Books, 1983
xiii + 384 pp., $19.95 (cloth), $8.95 (paper)
THE SCHOOLS WE DESERVE
Reflections on the Educational Crises of Our Time
Diane Ravitch
New York: Basic Books, 1985
ix + 137 pp., $19.95
CHALLENGE TO AMERICAN SCHOOLS
The Case for Standards and Values
Edited by John H. Bunzel
New York: Oxford University Press, 1985
viii + 248 pp., $19.95
It is strange how a nation as firmly rooted in fundamental ideas of ethics, political theory, and liberal education as America could have banished those fundamental values from its public schools only a century and a quarter after the Founding.
Yet that is what happened, according to educator Diane Ravitch.
Ravitch, a professor of history and education at Columbia University, is the author of nearly 150 articles and reviews, as well as two previous books. In The Troubled Crusade and The Schools We Deserve, she provides compelling discussions of the failings of public education in America -and how those failings came about.
Quite simply, Ravitch blames the progressive movement for undercutting genuine liberal education, asserting that the zealous social reformers of the 1900s viewed schools "as laboratories of social experimentation."
"The concept of social efficiency, which was popular among progressive reformers, put education into a new context," she writes. No longer were teachers to simply teach their students about certain classical subjects; instead, they were to direct the destiny of society by shaping the vocational futures of their students. Thus, the "traditional curriculum" was derided as "inefficient" for under its sway, children were taught history, literature, mathematics, and foreign languages even though they were not going to college; it was not only wasteful of the children's time but also served no useful social purpose. It became conventional in educational meetings to assert that the traditional curriculum, everything associated with a liberal education, was designed for an aristocratic class and was therefore unsuited to schools in a democracy. (Emphasis added.)
A key instigator in this shift away from genuine liberal education was John Dewey. Dewey's "notion of the school as a lever of social reform," writes Ravitch, became converted into "the school as a mechanism to adjust the individual to society." Purely utilitarian education became paramount; vocational education reigned as king of the mountain.
The irony here is
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