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The Educational Plight
| Article
# : |
14545 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1988 |
2,416 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
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
... (1988 of 14156 Characters)
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