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The Educational Plight
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14545 |
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EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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3 / 1988 |
2,416 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
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Currents in Modern Thought examines the plight of education in the United States and around the world in this issue. The situation in the United States is particularly depressing. A large underclass is functionally illiterate and greater numbers of graduates of high schools and even colleges are unfit to hold any but the simplest jobs, let alone to analyze issues of politics or morality.
Although it is true that education is a lifelong process that begins in the family, the system of free public education is the formal institution that has specific responsibility for educating the majority of young people in our society. How it conceives and carries out that responsibility is of immense importance to the nation.
While there are good and conscientious teachers and administrators in school systems, as Philip Jackson's article reminds us, the primary function of the system is bureaucratic: to attempt to justify the demands for money made by the system. In this respect I am reminded of a story by a late friend who served in the State Department during the Cold War as an expert on the international communist movement. An official from the Voice of America came to him and asked for information to show that the international communist movement was in decline for use in budgetary hearings. My friend told him the opposite was the case. The VOA official thought for five minutes and then said, "That's just as good."
Although John Dewey gets blamed by many for the ills of the public school system, he was not really responsible for the perversion of his ideas that eventually became endemic at Columbia Teachers College and other similar institutions. The idea that the comics were the highest form of art because they were the most popular or that adjustment was the end of education is a gross distortion of Dewey's ideas.
I am not a follower of Dewey, either philosophically or educationally, but he did emphasize correctly that the United States was a democracy and that our educational system should reflect that. It ought to respect the potential autonomy of each individual within the system and make students active participants in the process of learning. If this entailed respect for differences in values and opinions, it did not imply that all ideas or values were equally valid. Indeed, it was founded on the notion that some were wrong.
Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, public education in the United States, particularly in the cities, has the chief function of keeping students quiescent and the secondary function of showing that some minimal skills are apparently being acquired on the basis of dubious test scores. The idea that we are educating future adults whose votes and consumer choices will determine the future of our society seems to have been lost somewhere in the process.
When mass education was introduced in Prussia early in the nineteenth century, the idea was that a public that could read could more easily be mobilized by the government than one that was illiterate. Lenin preferred factory workers to others because those workers were used to following authoritarian leadership. Drilling in armies is designed to establish habits of obedience. But such practices surely should not predominate in democracies.
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