Dissatisfaction with our public school system began at its mid-nineteenth century inception. Conceived out of, and born back into, an intractably problematic social and cultural situation, the public school system has never escaped its difficulties because it has never fully discharged the tasks for which it was created: to simultaneously bring about individual self-fulfillment and the social-cultural machinery upon which the nation's economic progress would depend.
Never entirely absent, serious criticisms have emerged with peculiar force and urgency from time to time, generating highly visible disputes over what our schools are doing, whether they are succeeding, and how to account for what many consider their failures. Generally, educators have enjoyed this process, cheerfully joining their internal soul-searching to the periodic public outcries about their failures. This soul-searching has customarily led to an ever-stronger reaffirmation of faith in our public schools--and thence to increased resources to meet the problems all agreed were there. True, of late a more radical critique has surfaced, suggesting that the schooling process is so dysfunctional as to merit dismembering the institution itself. That critique, however, in spite of some disturbing evidence, has not deeply affected the course of our century-and-a-half marriage to the notion that better, and always more, public schooling can someday save us one and all, singly and together.
Today, of course, no one who watches television or reads the current newspapers and popular periodicals (let alone the more serious journals of social and cultural criticism) can escape awareness that we are at another serious period of soul-searching. We are confronting a broad array of particular issues in public schooling--viz, curricular content, student performance, institutional structure, teacher preparation and professional development, and, last but not least, increasing social and economic equity for the disadvantaged. Within the current debate there are two important foci, one essentially concerned with the amount of learning that results from the instruction that takes place in our schools, the other protesting an increasingly apparent paradox respecting the nature and role in the educational process of our ostensibly common beliefs and values. Although both these reform impulses have deep roots in our social, cultural and educational past, the first, the "amount of learning" focus, has had the longer recent public history.
Amount of learning
As our nation relaxed in the aftermath of World War II--a socially, emotionally, and economically draining military conflict--public schooling went "soft." It mirrored the "laid-back" mood of a society free to indulge itself with the material rewards that the conjunction of the Depression and the war had delayed, and to delve into its own psyche. Conceived (erroneously) to be the logical continuation of the old "progressive" education attributed (again erroneously) to John Dewey and his presumed disciples, this approach to education was called "life adjustment." It fit into the family of therapeutic, psychologically driven notions of what human life was about and what, therefore, schools should attempt to accomplish.
This socially obscurantist and personally self-indulgent notion of life and schooling could flourish only briefly. Within a mere decade, three facts brought a rude awakening: the roar of Sputnik, the
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