Let's admit what we want from the schools:
II, Frank C Arricale
The great education debate LETS ADMIT WHAT WE WANT FROM SCHOOLS THOUGHTS FROM THE TRENCHES THERE is carnage on the highways; schools then teach driver education. Blacks and whites don't love each...
...the schools become the exclusive inte-graters of society...
...As a professional youth server, can I say "no" and risk children being exposed to disease, malnutrition, or abuse...
...Salk's blessings to the young...
...Meeting all the needs of all the children all the time" seems to be the watchword of American schools as they are forced to become, in the absence of other institutions and organizations, the omni-purpose youth-serving agency of our society...
...My own belief is that American educational history will demonstrate that the schools expanded not like an octopus but like topsie who "just growed and growed...
...None of these initial common-sense reforms are possible unless the American public first realizes how it (and not some educators' cabal) has mandated more and new tasks for schools, not in a planned and developed strategy but usually in a racing response to crises...
...As we feed, integrate, immunize, and protect youths, we still realize that the indispensable intellectual mission cannot be neglected, reduced, or absorbed...
...If the school did everything, could it do well its specific job of enhancing human intelligence...
...the schools become addicted to anti-addiction programs...
...We must reorganize our large plants, adding new school administrative positions, and thereby enabling principals to be principal teachers supervising instruction and instructors rather than serving as managers of complex enterprises ranging from food service to finance, from security to social service, from transportation to toxification, from immunization to integration, and from recreation to rehabilitation...
...The question then becomes not should but how can the schools perform all their tasks and still give preeminence to the role of imparting academic skills in an age when the number and dimensions of those skills have expanded...
...When I was a young college teacher of education, I often provoked debate among my students on whether or not the schools should assume more non-academic rotes...
...The multi-service school requires increased funding to meet its additional obligations...
...When I was a young graduate student in the 1950s, writers like Columbia's Dean Barzun and Admiral Rick-over more than implied that the expansionist role of the schools was a premeditated plot on the part of pedagogues to take over, in a totalitarian sense, the lives of those they served...
...however, writers like Episcopalian Dean Bell and Jesuit Virgil Blum felt that the alleged neutralism of the schools actually masked a sectarian religion of secular humanism or Ethical Culture...
...and the less emphasis would be given to the task of developing the mind...
...If the school doesn't immunize, feed, bring the races together, or do for young people the host of other jobs to be done, who will do them...
...Only a "separationist'' Supreme Court kept the schools out of the religious life of children...
...Rather than eagerly reaching out like an octopus, many educators feared their schools were taking on the characteristics of the dinosaur...
...In my school district, the police and fire departments are the only other agencies visible and readily available to serve...
...Local and federal authorities kept assigning additional tasks, often to school systems unwilling and ill prepared to accept...
...Public health agencies despair of bringing Dr...
...Nutrition is a problem in affluent America...
...Today, as an overwhelmed school administrator, I find such a debate irrelevant...
...the schools become all-day community centers...
...Not the Little Red Schoolhouse but an ever expanding Multi-Purpose Service Center is the more appropriate modern image for the American school...
...Drug and alcohol abuse rates soar...
...the schools get into the immunization business...
...Communities worry about the recreational needs of young people...
...the schools serve lunch, and then breakfast, and perhaps soon we'll announce "Guess who is coming to dinner...
...Only when American taxpayers acknowledge the modern school as the all-purpose youth service center they have created by federal and state legislation, by court decisions, and by local school-board policies, and only after they have buried (with honor and gratitude) the anachronistic image of the little old schoolhouse - destroyed as much by increased public expectations as by the demands of modern science and curriculum - then only will our citizenry be ready and willing to give the schools the financial support, the public esteem, and the enduring encouragement required so mat we won't be overwhelmed by the many-faceted endeavors now defined as schooling...
...Venereal disease and teenage pregnancy - why not more sex education...
...Blacks and whites don't love each other...
...The more weight the school took on in its body, the smaller a head it would evolve...
...The public welfare agencies, since they have been computerized, are rarely seen...
...A firm commitment to systematic, regular in-service teacher training must be given as knowledge and the various sciences expand and become more intricate...
...FRANK C. ARRICALE, II...
...One writer saw "educationists" as "octopuses" extending their tentacles to every area of the young person's life...
Vol. 110 • September 1983 • No. 15
