Reschooling society

...In President Reagan's list, for example, we can certainly question whether the concept of religion per se is as clear and generally understood as are the concepts of justice, equality, and liberty...

...Shorn of specifics, what are alarmed Americans asking for...

...This criticism is more contemporary and somewhat different in detail, but we have to admit it is very like the long-continuing warning about public education and its evils — a warning which used to be sounded from Catholic pulpits as the day for school registration neared...

...The implication is clean with such an ill-equipped work force America's position in the world economy is endangered...

...He faulted the schools for the exclusion of religion as a subject, and, consequently, of "our Judeo-Christian heritage...

...Their aim seems often to be the imposition of values...

...But we must start somewhere in an attempt to untangle "the convoluted state in which society finds itself...

...In our history schools became the center for pioneer and rural communities of the semi-isolated and uprooted who came to a new land or a new part of the country...

...For the transmission of knowledge and skills necessary to public and economic citizenship...

...Black eighth graders have been raised from the thirtieth to the fortieth percentile in reading, and from the fifty-second to the sixtieth in mathematics...

...More money has been allocated for teachers' salaries and for textbooks and laboratory materials...

...Edwin Xavier Travers to the Washington Post...

...In the past the American schools have been extraordinarily successful in doing just those very things...

...For success is coming to the schools once again — and it is coming regionally...

...The New York-based Committee for Economic Development issued a report which said that an alarming number of children leave school without learning the discipline and work habits necessary for success in the marketplace, and also without a sufficient command of English to communicate effectively in either writing or speech which is required for achievement in the business world...

...Tests for teacher certification are required, as are competency tests for current teachers...

...As the school year opened he sought to dramatize the need of good teaching by highly publicized visits to eight schools around the country...

...In the South, in state after state, legislatures and city governments have concentrated on improving the schools...

...Conveniently, they have forgotten that the school ranks third behind the family and the church as a socializing institution...

...One might say that American public education suffers now from the successes of its past...

...In the attempt to find a scapegoat for society's failures, we have opted once again to seize on the schools as the culprit...

...the number of second-year high school students above the national average rose from 40 to 51 percent...

...Given help, direction, resources, and the right teachers, the schools can do wonders and start us on our way...

...4 October 1985: 519 Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy RESCHOOLING SOCIETY REGIONAL EFFORTS SPELL SUCCESS IN TIMES of great change and individual stress, people tend to feel that their institutions have failed them...

...As a result, test scores have soared...

...For the transmission of values which will create community...

...The number two man in the Department of Education, Undersecretary Gary Bauer, carried the attack on the schools farther in a speech in which he laid much of the blame for the breakdown of morals in society and the rise of drug abuse, teenage alcoholism, and suicide on the schools and their "value-neutral" cur-ricuiums...

...Fundamentalist Protestants have, of late, made this attack their own in an even more organized and intense way...

...Yet the truth is that in America the schools have often shaped society...

...Before stepping down as Secretary of Education, Terrel Bell said unequivocally in a final interview, which appeared in U.S...

...If educators were not already reeling from the load of responsibility thrust on mem by government leaders, they must have been so when business leaders joined the discussion in mid-September...

...Right now the schools, although weakened by poor financing and poor community support, are doing the same thing for a diverse mix of third-world refugees and Asians with astonishing success...

...The home, the church, the school, and of course, the government, are not what they should be...

...Perhaps to have agreement, reform and improvement must be regional...

...That institutions too have been assaulted with the same rapid and unforeseen change does not seem to matter...

...In drawing the comparison he was only echoing the alarm sounded in 1983 ("A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform") by a federally funded commission...

...As the opening of this school year neared, Bell's successor, Secretary William J. Bennett, attacked the curriculum once again in a speech to the Knights of Columbus in August...

...We have been left orphaned and unprotected...

...The commission described schools nationwide as in desperate need of better curriculums and better teachers...

...This function of the school becomes apparent wherever new influxes occur — around new oil fields, new port facilities, newly developed areas of industrial growth...

...News and World Report, that Japanese schools were far superior to American schools in very specific ways: The Japanese educational system is superior to ours . . . [in] academic achievement in such areas as literacy and command of mathematics and science . . . There is much more emphasis on order and discipline . . . Japanese students must master a second language . . . There is [a] single national curriculum . . . students grow up learning to perform at the outer limit of their ability, which washes over into the work place after they graduate...

...It is a truism that the function of the schools is to educate, not to change society...

...Abigail McCarthy Commonweal: 520...

...We must teach the importance of justice, equality, religion, liberty, and standards of right and wrong...

...In the counties of Maryland and Virginia near Washington, D.C., where black students fell anywhere from 20 to 37 percentile points behind whites, there have been successes as a result of concentrated effort...

...It is no wonder that some educators feel as does the teacher who wrote to a major newspaper: Americans have always expected too much of their public schools...

...In one county of South Carolina, for example, for the first time in its history grade school students scored above the national average in every subject area...

...The problems of the disadvantaged are yielding to regional attack, too...

...Look at the charges leveled at the public elementary and secondary schools this year (and, to some extent, at the parochial schools as well...

...Merit pay for teachers is being tried...

...American society refuses to see the ugliness that exists in our schools as a reflection of the ugliness that exists in society...

...Again and again, it was through the schools that wave after wave of almost illiterate and impoverished immigrants entered the urban mainstream...

...He made it clear that, in his opinion, our history and its basic documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are either not taught at all or taught in such a way that our shared values are not made explicit...

...Granted that the transmission of values must be values agreed on, it is here that many of the critics can be faulted...

...The schools may not be the cause of that state but they may be the way out...

...Bauer was in a sense only repeating President Reagan's thesis in a speech on education last February.The president said that students should not only learn basic subjects but basic values...

...In these visits, incidentally, in which he took over classrooms to show what should be taught and how it should be taught, he proved himself a skillful teacher worthy of emulation in method, at least...