|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
American Culture and the Public School
| Article
# : |
13944 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1988 |
4,544 Words |
| Author
: |
Henry C. Johnson, Jr.
Henry C. Johnson, Jr., is professor of educational theory and
policy at Pennsylvania State University. |
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
... (2000 of 28478 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
