Who Should Control Education?
Jencks, Christopher
American liberals have traditionally believed that many of the country's problems were susceptible to gradual and comparatively painless solution by combining education and technological...
...The only alternative that I can see is to establish a freer market and thus give more direct power to parents and students...
...Given today's political realities, educators can seldom resist such middle-class demands...
...The growing complexity of the economy has created a variety of occupations which rival or surpass the clergy in erudition and breadth of experience, thereby reducing the authority of the pulpit as the arbiter of community morals...
...First, it is cheap and convenient...
...Rather, it is an industry in which the small entrepreneur can often do his job as well as, or better than, the big time operator...
...American liberals have traditionally believed that many of the country's problems were susceptible to gradual and comparatively painless solution by combining education and technological innovation...
...The average American goes to school only 12 years out of almost 70, and during those years he is in school only about 180 days out of 365, and usually only about 6 hours each day...
...As student sub-cultures grow more diverse and encompass more of the students' lives, their dependence on adults seems in some respects to diminish...
...I have suggested that the major change now taking place in the educational system is the growing power of the professional educators, and I have argued that this will do little to solve the problems of most students...
...Graduate programs will undergo enormous expansion, creating more jobs for men with good scholarly credentials...
...in areas where mass production or national advertising is vitally important, a "free" market tends to produce oligopoly or monopoly, and the customer is often left with no real choice among products...
...Second, certain communities have a wide spread of incomes and personalities...
...The dropouts, however, will be more and more on the defensive in the nonacademic world...
...This applies not only to undergraduate education in the universities but to the supposedly independent liberal arts colleges, and even colleges nominally dedicated to saving souls, training teachers and preparing young ladies to become Southern matrons...
...Advanced placement" courses are another sign of the times...
...If it were, there would be no need for radicalism in modern America...
...And all these differences are mirrored in the graduate schools...
...If we want to go very far in this direction, however, the administration of the public sector of the educational economy must be reorganized...
...In other words, if everyone were literate, ambitious, and socially poised, everyone could earn a comfortable middle-class living...
...Again, the pattern is one in which the "liberals" support professional autonomy while the "conservatives" argue for the layman's right to decide what goes on in a school or college...
...This kind of analysis shows quite clearly that education is a virtual monopoly of the middle classes, and that the great conflicts are in large part intraclass conflicts...
...knowing more about the problems you tackle than anyone else...
...The student, at whatever level, is not encouraged to discover and define reality for himself...
...The universities generate many of the ideas which give politicians and civil servants a sense of purpose...
...The most one can hope for is an administrator who will hire subordinates of quite different outlooks and then let them ride off in all directions...
...Spock and Margaret Mead, and to the schools...
...Teachers will no doubt disagree...
...With so much money available for research, even institutions which have done little to push back the intellectual frontiers are anxious to do more—or at least to seem to do more...
...The teachers will, moreover, find it easier than in the past to satisfy their perennial impulse to work in or near the centers of power and influence...
...If students have a choice about whether they attend a particular school or not, it should become politically possible to free the principal and staff of the school from many of the restrictions which now hem them in...
...They might also hold that public funds could not go to a school or college which held religious services on its premises— though this latter seems unlikely...
...In such settings the professional educators' freedom to experiment must continue to be limited by what the local board of education judges acceptable to the community...
...The power of a single organization to move in diverse directions is usually limited not only by the top man but by the staff...
...For reasons already suggested, however, these limitations on academic power and pressure are diminishing, and the pace of learning is accelerating...
...The hegemony of the universities will almost certainly accelerate the nationalization of the whole educational system...
...The classic example of this pattern is, of course, the perennial struggle over educational finances, in which the educators ask for more money, the "liberals" support the demand, and the "conservatives" oppose it...
...Many students must gain whatever satisfaction they can from watching classmates they hardly know perform with skill they cannot equal...
...11 Ours is an academic age...
...Professors from the leading universities have been involved in preparing curriculum materials and in training teachers to use them...
...If the least adept students are given slightly better instruction, while instruction of the most adept gets substantially better, the competitive position of the least adept will deteriorate rather than improve...
...There is nowhere near as much freedom to organize one's own teaching projects in an idiosyncratic way as there is with research projects...
...Those who cannot perform such work are, with certain excep tions, condemned to live at or below the subsistence level...
...Over the years, however, they are perhaps the single most important source of innovation in society...
...At every level an effort should be made to reduce the distinction between the public and private sectors, encouraging them to compete on equal terms for students and allocating funds among them according to the number of students they attract...
...Only the most prosperous parents, who can afford to support their children at both levels, seem likely to opt for expensive undergraduate education...
...With the major exceptions of racial and religious questions, this pattern characterizes almost the full range of educational politics...
...In large part, moreover, this mirror is the creation of his classmates, not his teachers...
...At the college level, a small, manageable student body will not usually have enough students interested in politics to sustain a group of left or right-wing activists...
...Parents, speaking through the board of education, complain if their children are worked too hard or "can't keep up...
...But improving the system in this way will do nothing to eliminate poverty, and may even intensify it...
...One must judge by results, and today's largely public system of administration has produced neither an equitable nor an efficient and imaginative deployment of educational resources...
...In recent decades even business and public administration, the last prestigious holdouts against professionalization and academic preparation, have begun to fall into line...
...This means that a child living in one part of town must be allowed to apply for a school in another part on precisely the same basis as a child who lives around the corner from the school in question...
...For one thing, the present emphasis on admission to the "right" college will probably be more and more overshadowed and supplanted by emphasis on admission to the "right" graduate school...
...American society is organized on the assumption that if you want to live comfortably you have to perform some kind of work which society values...
...It is clear, then, that schools and colleges are being asked to assume a large measure of responsibility for the personalities, attitudes and competence of the next generation...
...Students both in school and college conspire tacitly or explicitly to restrict output...
...The market mechanism is not, of course, foolproof...
...But that is not in itself an argument against change...
...Today there is little real debate about the necessity of providing occupational training in school as well as (and in some measure instead of) on the job...
...it is that they are part of the system which produces the disorders...
...At first glance this appears to be a fairly simple question, which can be answered by studying the legislators, philanthropists, and parents who put up most of the money for education, and the boards of education and trustees which nominally control most schools and colleges...
...If everyone is to spend a substantial part of the years between five and twenty-five in educational institutions, the definition of such institutions must somehow become more flexible...
...One possibility is to try to make schools and colleges more pluralistic, encouraging faculty to teach in more ways and students to create more sub-cultures within each institution...
...Yet he can seldom be healthy or satisfied unless lie also has the skill to make some kind of peace, however fragile or fraudulent, with adult expectations...
...This pattern is extremely obvious in elementary education, increasingly so in junior and senior highs, and has begun to appear even in higher education...
...One reason for this is the rising importance of federal and foundation support, compared to such traditional sources as state legislatures and alumni...
...No matter how big the place gets, there is only one student paper, one band, one football team, one valedictorian and so forth...
...Similarly, a small junior high school will not have enough bookish students to sustain an intellectual sub-culture, nor will it have enough potential junkies to support a narcotics saleman...
...According to this venerable notion, the best educational system is one in which everyone who lives in a particular area attends school or college with everyone else living in that area...
...This is probably true...
...The modern "schoolchild" is in many respects just that: the child of an institution...
...As a result, education has become a kind of secular religion, and teachers a sort of lay clergy...
...Over any considerable period of time the men who teach in America's leading graduate schools determine for the rest of us not only what is true and what is false but in large measure what is "done" and "not done...
...While this solution ought to be more widely available than it is, particularly to Negroes in the Deep South, it is not an appealing alternative to many families...
...For him the school provides the mirror in which to discover himself...
...The roots of this change go back to the nineteenth century, when schools of medicine, law, and theology were established in the better American universities...
...A third limitation is that there are some parents whose educational preferences do not deserve to be indulged, even if educators can be found to indulge them...
...They also often deal with faculty members rather than going through administrators and trustees...
...A radical analysis of American education must, then, begin by focusing on the question of who controls our schools and colleges...
...One reason is that while increased enrollment brings an increase in the number and variety of student activities, the latter never increase in proportion to the former...
...As a result, there will be a growing consensus among educators and laymen that "improving" education at each level consists not of preparing students better for the non-academic world, but preparing them better for the next higher level...
...How many parents will be willing to spend a large fraction of their income on such "intangibles" if there is a cheap and respectable public college just around the corner, and if this college seems to ensure its more gifted BA's entry into the nation's top graduate schools...
...This means that his professors can make him act like an apprentice historian while he is enrolled in the course...
...Even our commitment of time may well be inadequate for the tasks we expect to accomplish in the classroom...
...They do not, of course, defend giving the inept students an inept teacher or poorly equipped classroom...
...In that case they might require that a school receiving public support be open to all comers, regardless of IQ or academic record...
...The geographic mobility which has made it easier for children to anticipate that they will sooner or later be freed from the parental shadow has also made it possible for every one to change churches more easily, creating a buyer's market in religion...
...Employers have wanted to put vocational and professional training under public auspices to save themselves money and effort...
...Perhaps most important, it means that a student who wants to attend a private school or college should get the same subsidy from the state as a student who wants to attend a public school or college, so long as the private institution meets minimal criteria established by the state...
...The limits are as often imposed by colleagues anxious to preserve standards and "continuity" as by administrators...
...Thus there will be more and more pressure for federal "leadership" and federal "standards" at all levels, and the result will be more federal "control...
...This will not only decimate undergraduate classrooms but lure many talented teachers away from the elementary and secondary schools...
...There are, of course, still plenty of colleges where the majority of students reject all this and intend to go to work in what they see as an anti-intellectual business community...
...If that happens, poverty will grow more widespread...
...To avoid this we must make a real effort to promote experimentation and to create specialized schools catering to various minority tastes...
...In the first place, America has assigned a comparatively small share of her resources to the task...
...If elementary schools suggest that it is more important for children to get along with one another than to acquire adult virtues, most parents will acquiesce...
...This assumption is now firmly established in the elementary schools, largely dominant in the secondary schools, and for reasons already indicated is spreading to the colleges...
...This is true to a lesser extent of some big comprehensive high schools...
...and they train men to do the more complicated jobs in business and government...
...Another recurrent example is the struggle for "academic freedom," a term which can mean almost anything but is generally used in debates about the political, theological or moral content of a teacher's classes or reading lists...
...This should not, in my view, prevent a school from setting up a strictly academic program geared to hard working and talented children...
...In the great majority of institutions there is one dominant style, and all other possibilities are looked down on...
...Yet even at the local level teachers have in recent years shown unprecedented readiness to organize, lobby for better schools, and withdraw their services if they don't get what they want...
...The most important problem is size...
...Academicians are subject to less direct pressure from these groups, either with regard to their own affairs or in their dealings with the young...
...If a school wants to recruit teachers without regard to the number of education courses they have taken, and if parents find the resulting program suits their children, this should be possible...
...Once educators have got done denying that the problem doesn't exist, they usually make suggestions of this kind...
...Industry is also eager to transfer responsibility for the socialization and training of prospective employees to the schools...
...Less than three per cent of the adult population is employed in teaching, and except at the graduate level and in a few colleges this three per cent includes only a few of America's most talented men and women...
...By the time most students reach adolescence they have become expert in outwardly seeming to conform to parental demands while actually adapting to the less easily evaded expectations of their classmates...
...Whether the problem is the arms race or America's enthusiasm for minding other nations' business, racism or poverty, illness or crime, the solution is not to be found in the classroom...
...This anxiety has produced an unprecedented concern about that elusive attribute "quality," as well as about its more measurable (if largely meaningless) counterpart, "credentials...
...Many such students will, I think, be willing to attend "comprehensive" public commuter colleges during their undergraduate years, just as they now attend comprehensive public high schools...
...These problems cannot be solved merely by learning more...
...As a result, college faculties have increasing power to shape their institutions...
...Typically there is a "liberal" group which takes its cues from the professionals and supports their demands, and a "conservative" group which opposes the dominant professional opinion on the subject...
...Somewhere it must have men who initiate new activities, who take the lead in responding to new problems and to a changing environment...
...For a variety of reasons best known to politicians, the professional educators seem to have substantially more influence over decisions made at the state and federal level than over decisions made locally...
...Scholars who commute to Washington as consultants, for example, often listen sympathetically to those who propose that graduate or undergraduate students should gain political experience as part of their education...
...This means that schools and colleges rooted in these communities seem very "democratic...
...Educators generally, and university scholars particularly, tend to gear the educational program to precocious and talented youngsters such as they themselves usually were...
...But this is the exception...
...Already the academic profession has an essentially national outlook, and tends to be impatient with the parochial interests of local boards who assume that the educational system under their control should have a special mission or standards...
...The battle over racial segregation, too, is largely a struggle between lower-middle-class Negroes who want to escape the ghetto mentality and lower-middle-class whites whose status and self-assurance are too fragile to accept Negroes as equals...
...Competition can and does flourish when the government does not rig the market...
...For the students, a system dominated by the academic profession and the top universities will mean several changes...
...If a student is not comfortable with the style which dominates his institution, if he does not find that the attitudes and talents of its leading crowd complement his own, he must either go underground or elsewhere...
...Nevertheless, there are very few schools or colleges which include the full range of possible responses to such youthful realities as ignorance and curiosity, loneliness and sexuality, powerlessness and irresponsibility...
...It means that a student who wants to attend a university which is 200 (or 2000) miles from his home should be given as much assistance as he needs to pay his room and board bills rather than being forced by poverty to attend a junior college to which he can commute...
...But it is almost impossible to find administrators at any level who can take responsibility for actively promoting a wide variety of contradictory programs...
...In part, of course, the proposed reorganization of the academic marketplace will do this, for if a special-purpose school, either public or private, can draw from all income groups and all geographic areas its chances of finding and retaining a stable constituency will be much greater than today...
...Most of the secondary school teachers have been trained in the colleges (some have also had some graduate work), and their definitions of what is worth knowing and how it should be taught are at least partially acquired in college...
...Such schools and colleges provide appropriate socialization for the corporate or governmental civil service and for many professions...
...Adults will assume that a "normal" youngster should go on to get a graduate degree, and that those who fail to follow this course are stupid, rebellious, inflexible, or in some other way socially tainted...
...Schools and colleges can only play a major role in solving America's social problems if control over them passes to new individuals and interests which expect to benefit from solving these problems...
...At least as presently and prospectively organized, they keep students largely passive and dependent...
...There is no inherent virtue in public administration of the schools any more than in public administration of universities, post offices or the telephone system...
...Formally, of course, these battles are fought in the lay arena...
...they can be solved only by taking the right to make certain decisions away from some people and giving power to others...
...If outside laymen still controlled colleges as tightly as they once did, the recruitment and expectations of faculty and students might make little difference...
...In this same era land-grant colleges were set up to provide scientific training for farmers and engineers...
...indeed, many of the more common sorts of intervention by boards of laymen are likely to make matters worse...
...Indeed, there is often strong resistance even to allowing faculty who are already in the club to undertake radically new programs which seem to constitute an indictment of the status quo...
...But they do not want talented teachers diverted from work with gifted children to "remedial" or "vocational" work, nor do they want improvement of slum schools given higher priority than the improvement of their own schools...
...At the other end of the spectrum, elementary school teachers who are also mothers want to expose their pupils to the full range of activities that they offer their own children, from trips to the zoo to individual reading or tinkering projects...
...But education does not appear to be an industry with such a propensity to concentration...
...There are, of course, exceptions to this pattern of uniformity...
...The reasons for this hegemony are several...
...If an institution wants to be all things to all people, it must be large...
...but any look at the past suggests that the trend is toward more and more autonomy for the professors, less and less authority for the laymen...
...Will changes of the kind I have predicted cure any of the present diseases of American society...
...Public institutions, in other words, should wherever possible have the same kinds of autonomy that private institutions now have...
...Often enough, life outside the school is so much more compelling than life inside that a student is psychologically absent even during the hours he spends in class...
...The anonymity of a large institution can lead to tragedy as well as emancipation...
...The result of all this is that while it becomes harder for the young to escape the embrace of educational institutions, the range of activities possible within this embrace is much wider than it was a generation or two ago...
...They typically argue that "the best way to improve the education system is to start at the top...
...The high schools will be run for the benefit of those who plan to attend college, the colleges will be run for those who plan to attend graduate school...
...Parents of the better pupils (middleclass parents by and large) inevitably resist such efforts...
...This does not, of course, mean that academic and professional freedom is universal or irreversible...
...Students in this system will find themselves under pressure to grow up faster than they have in the past...
...One reason may be that state and federal legislators are typically better educated than the local school board members, and may therefore be more deferential toward the claims of educators...
...The value of such a system depends, of course, on the amount of real diversity it creates...
...Sooner or later (mostly later) victory in such struggles usually goes to the liberals...
...but there is much to be said for leaving the decision about whether to enter such a school to parents and students rather than to testers and teachers...
...We are, however, more and more an urban people, whose rich live in suburbs and whose poor live in slums...
...The first step toward the establishment of such an educational system would be to abandon the tradition that education should be rooted in geography...
...Business and government are in many respects as dependent on the universities as the professions are...
...The result is that the educators have more and more control both over their own affairs and over their students...
...In part, this assumption is correct...
...Instead, a system with such aims must try to establish a wide variety of somewhat specialized and distinctive institutions, each following its unique path, each doing only what its staff can do well, each attracting its own constituency and serving that constituency in its own way...
...If the child is successful by his classmates' standards he becomes confident in a way that he never does if he succeeds only in pleasing his elders...
...Academically talented or socially fortunate children are, of course, likely to give more of their lives to educational institutions: often as much as four, and sometimes even six per cent...
...The resulting limita tions are illustrated by looking closely at one of the many problems education is normally expected to solve: poverty...
...This means that any school which receives public funds should be open to public inspection, and that the results of such inspection should be publicly available...
...keeping personal feelings and emotional impulses to yourself...
...Nevertheless, the similarities between graduate programs are generally more striking than the differences...
...Nor is this trend confined to the colleges...
...The essential point in either case would be to use the market mechanism to ensure that the allocation of resources among competing schools and colleges was in the hands of students and parents...
...But most of America's problems are rooted not in technological or intellectual ineptitude but in genuine conflicts of interest...
...What do these developments portend for the future...
...In that event the undergraduate colleges attached to major universities may go the same way as the academic high schools of an earlier era: surviving and even prospering, but still appealing only to a small, cosmopolitan and highly motivated minority...
...Competition for these slots therefore grows more intense as size increases...
...Nor have they been slow to exercise this influence...
...The inability of the typical American home to prepare its young for adult life needs little documentation...
...The inability of schools to cure America's social disorders comes as a continuing disappointment to almost everyone (with the possible exception of teachers...
...An educational "consumers union" would also be useful in this context, and if millions of parents were suddenly free to choose among a variety of schools and colleges, such a union would probably spring up...
...At any particular level, this assumption will be correct for more and more students, even though in the forseeable future the great majority will continue to drop out somewhere along the path to a graduate degree...
...They look outside the home for guidance: to their neighbors, to the mass media, to Dr...
...The reason for this is not the megalomania of educators...
...The only serious debate is whether particular kinds of training need be extensive or brief, and at which educational level they should be provided...
...He devotes only about two per cent of his lifetime to formal education...
...The world of medicine is not the same as the world of physics, economic advice is not offered in quite the same way as legal advice, literary criticism requires a different temperament from library management...
...Most conflicts over education are not, however, conflicts among lay interests but between one or another lay group and the professionals...
...If a public university wants to hire fewer professors and pay higher salaries than its competitors, it should be free to take that approach so long as it can live within a standard allocation of money for each student...
...What can be done to remedy this situation...
...Labor unions, professional associations and the like wanted their training programs in schools and colleges to give their callings status...
...More and more faculty can "write their own ticket...
...There are fewer and fewer communities in which a "local" school or college is heterogeneous and more in which it is economically and/or ethnically homogeneous...
...Even if these problems could be solved, the drive for pluralism would entail major sacrifices...
...A second reason for the hegemony of the graduate schools is that the proportion of undergraduates who plan to go on to graduate school appears to be steadily increasing...
...The vital link between formal education and workaday world is usually the graduate professional school...
...I shall therefore lump all of these programs under the general rubric "graduate schools," and will assume that all graduate schools are professional schools, even when the "profession" for which they prepare is archaeology or musicology...
...In this respect, as in others, the undergraduate pattern of tomorrow is likely to mirror the secondary school pattern of today...
...The decline of the family as a shaper of the young has been matched by the decline of the churches, and for similar reasons...
...The impact of the emerging system of education on American society is far from clear, but at least in some respects trouble appears likely...
...The parent who would resist this pattern, soon discovers that his powers are extremely limited...
...So far as educators are concerned, the picture seems clear...
...Second, a radical must ask whether the emerging system of education will be good in its own right, i.e., will those who teach and learn and live within the system find it more satisfying than they find the present system...
...Especially in colleges and universities, where the faculty expect to play a major role in choosing their colleagues, there is normally great resistance to establishing new programs which will bring radically different sorts of instructors into the club...
...University administrators are usually readier than school administrators to allow a variety of dis tinctive or even conflicting enterprises within their bailiwick...
...In its pure form, the system I am advocating would give the professional educators absolute freedom to establish any kinds of schools and colleges they see fit, while giving parents and students absolute freedom to choose among these schools and colleges as they see fit...
...they must improve it faster than they improve the position of the rest of the pupils...
...These teachers tend to regard their years in graduate school as a model of what all education should be like...
...The present influence of the elite undergraduate college may be further eroded if, as seems likely, it becomes increasingly difficult for any undergraduate program to attract big-name teachers...
...This principle could be realized either by making all subsidies take the form of tuition grants or by paying public funds to schools and colleges according to the number, level and perhaps the incapacity to pay of their students...
...The essential principle of such an educational system would be that the needs of individual students have primacy over the needs of institutions, public or private, and that subsidies will be spent on the kinds of education parents and students want, not on the kind politicians want and control...
...But it is by no means certain that the role of the student will be diversified as fast as it should be when you consider the increasing proportion of the population which is being forced into this role for ever longer periods of time...
...A generation ago young people almost never mixed marriage with study...
...Size tends to affect not only the relationship among students but that between students and adults...
...But educational institutions also have important limitations...
...Indeed, it is perhaps the possibility of the former which encourages the latter...
...The courts would presumably hold, for example, that public funds could not go to a school or college which discriminated in favor of Catholics...
...not getting hung up on questions that are too big or too fundamental to be "manageable...
...They are building a unified educational system, running from pre-school to graduate school, all of whose parts will be increasingly articulated with one another...
...Then too, neither state nor federal legislators can easily punish educators who mobilize public opinion against them or try to push them in directions they don't want to go...
...They put an imprimatur on the young which tells outsiders that a particular man is an insider...
...These schools, concentrated in a few dozen universities, train almost all the important educators, doctors, lawyers, engineers, economists, and literary critics, as well as many of the leading businessmen, government officials, and even military officers...
...All of the major professions have come to depend on universities, not just to train their recruits but to provide old-timers with new techniques and ideas...
...In some of these cases the impact of what happens in school is so strong that it helps shape the rest of the student's life...
...Even this is rare...
...Sporadic reassertions of political control are not likely to turn the trick...
...Today both mixtures are becoming more common, and the role of the "student" is far more open-ended and potentially satisfying to a variety of dissimilar temperaments...
...Both the foundations and the federal government are inclined to consult professional rather than lay opinion in deciding how to spend their money...
...Our dependence on schools and colleges to socialize the young has increased steadily during recent years...
...But for many students bigness is an invitation to passivity and anomie...
...For all of these reasons, an educational system which aspires to offer the young both a manageable environment and a wide range of choice should not try to make each of its enterprises all things to all people...
...Faced with a shortage of distinguished or even competent scholars, boards of trustees and administrators have nevertheless shown unprecedented eagerness to maintain standards, and in many cases have even struggled to raise them...
...Nor do most educators have an impulse to resist, even if they could...
...Some of these institutions should be large, others small, but in each case the aim should be to determine size according to the needs of the teachers and students rather than on the basis of administrative convenience or logistic pressure...
...Conversely, students whose failure to learn was once accepted as normal and predictable are now defined as "problems," and are segregated into "remedial" programs of one kind or another...
...Its justification is twofold...
...The "curriculum reform" movement, for example, is primarily an effort to remake the secondary (and to a lesser extent, the elementary) curriculum in the image of the college and the graduate school curricula—only better...
...Today this tendency is somewhat restrained by the power of laymen...
...The customs and concerns of the graduate schools increasingly mold undergraduate education...
...In a large student body, no matter how carefully selected, many individuals find they have no special contribution to make, no well-defined role to give them a sense of being valued, and every reason to assume that they are regarded as expendable...
...The wellsprings of authority in this system will be the graduate schools, which have direct contact with the dominant institutions in the larger society and which therefore embody and symbolize the demands of the "real" world...
...The limitations derive from the fact of central administration and from the desire of most teachers to work with colleagues who differ from themselves along only a few dimensions...
...Parental reluctance to invest large sums in undergraduate education may be particularly marked if federal support for graduate students lags behind costs, so that the parents expect to be asked for substantial contributions to their children's graduate education...
...The basic reason why schools and colleges cannot cure our major social disorders is not, however, their lack of resources...
...Even more important, although the role of the student is fairly flexible when viewed in a national context, it is often extremely rigid in the particular school or college he is forced to attend...
...For the many youngsters who are born tragedyprone, such an educational setting is a mistake...
...The teacher who criticizes a local school board, on the other hand, may find himself unemployed...
...The leading universities will have far more influence on the rest of the educational system than the system has on them...
...But a society cannot be wholly run by organization men...
...The middle classes realize quite well that American life is competitive, and that if their children are to prosper they must get "the best" education...
...Even such a symbolically pre-academic man as the yeoman farmer has come to depend on the university extension service...
...The reason is that parents, clergymen, and employers have found it harder and harder to meet their traditional responsibilities...
...Since the graduate schools are usually a generation ahead of whatever segment of the society they lead, their influence at any particular moment always looks modest...
...Some such colleges may fold, while the rest will come to serve the same mixture of education-conscious upper-middle class families and carefully selected scholarship students now found in the better private schools...
...Standing as they do at the crossroads between education and employment, the graduate schools have enormous potential influence on the rest of education...
...High school teachers of these courses give instruction which is avowedly and deliberately similar to what has traditionally been given to college freshmen, and many colleges now give credit for such work if students do sufficiently well on a national exam devised for the purpose...
...Comparatively few responsible employed adults were also students...
...Unfortunately, however, skills are not absolute but relative—and hence competitive...
...The days are long gone when parents could or would spend most of their time with the young, either in household or farm work...
...First, the graduate schools are the principal source of college teachers...
...The student who a generation ago would not have cared whether he got an "A" or a "C" in European History now does care...
...Everyone concerned agrees that the graduate schools are the wave of the future...
...And now that he sees himself as a prospective graduate student he is often eager to play the amateur Ranke...
...If it does, there will not be enough journalists to put out a good newspaper or enough squares to sustain the fraternities...
...As the cost of living away from home rises, and as youthful unemployment makes it harder for poor students to earn enough to meet this cost, the children of the slums who want to go to college will be under growing pressure to attend the local commuter college...
...The battle over church-state relations, for example, is largely a struggle between middle-class Catholics who want "the best" education for their child and don't want to pay for it twice, and the middle-class non-Catholics who think religious separatism a national menace...
...This may be fine from the students' viewpoint, but it frees them for foolish as well as wise experiments...
...A free market would, of course, reduce enrollment in publicly-controlled schools and increase enrollment in privately-controlled schools...
...The quality of performance in each activity is better, but fewer students participate actively...
...If we want a radical change in the present system, a mechanism must be found for offsetting the power of the profession...
...The growing emphasis on academic preparation for secondary teachers, and the feeling that the skills and training required for a college teacher are essentially the same as those required for a high school teacher, are a natural consequence of such trends...
...Similarly, the private residential liberal arts college may, like the boarding school of an earlier era, price itself out of reach of most families...
...First, every effort must be made to ensure that students and parents have complete freedom to choose among all the various schools and colleges in the nation...
...111 What is an appropriate radical response to these developments— assuming I have predicted them accurately...
...There are, of course, differences among graduate schools...
...Both have agreed that such a transfer of responsibility would provide more equality of opportunity and more assurance that the young would get high quality training...
...If the poor, for example, want to narrow the gap between what their children learn in school and what the children of the middle classes learn, they will have to fight for a larger voice in the allocation of personnel and money among competing schools and competing programs within schools...
...Little will be gained by providing more choice if this turns out to be between hundreds of virtually identical institutions...
...This applies not only to the diversification of "credit" courses, but to the growing flexibility of the role of the "student...
...If a principal wants to recruit a staff and set up a Montessori school, and if he can find parents who want to send their children to such a school, he should be free to follow his mission...
...Both "the best" and "the worst" are defined by comparison with the rest...
...The local school board depends more and more upon state and federal assistance to balance its budget and is therefore subject to the decisions of state and federal legislators about how money should be spent...
...If such families don't like the nearest school their only alternative is a boarding school...
...If colleges take sex and liquor for granted among undergraduates, most parents will protest only feebly...
...on the contrary, such faith has been conspicuously lacking...
...A big state university, for example, is likely to have a variety of student sub-cultures, and a student is likely to have considerable freedom to join whichever he finds congenial...
...They have found, too, that their schools are in fact ersatz families, competing with parents for control over the young...
...These colleges, moreover, are increasingly cosmopolitan...
...If we want to end poverty we must concentrate not on increasing the absolute educational level of the population but on narrowing the gap between the best educated and the worst educated...
...With the safeguards outlined, a system of free choice could have an enormously beneficial effect on the American educational scene...
...Academicians use whatever leverage they have to enforce their more universalistic viewpoint, and they find that the federal civil service and to a lesser extent the President and the Congress are their natural allies in such struggles...
...Transportation costs are cut to a minimum for the young, and even college students are spared the expense of living away from home...
...As a result, colleges compete to improve salaries and working conditions...
...they invent many of the scientific and managerial techniques which make it possible for both governmental and corporate bureaucracies to achieve their purposes...
...As a practical matter, however, pluralism within institutions has both limitations and drawbacks...
...Without distinguished faculties, the difference between an elite residential college and a "comprehensive" commuter college will be more and more a matter of "tradition," and "atmosphere...
...We seem to be headed for a world in which everyone will spend more time in the classroom and related activities, in which performance in these activities will be more important for success elsewhere, and in which the larger society will increasingly mirror the values and organization of the classroom...
...Expenditures on education are usually reckoned at between five and six per cent of the Gross National Product...
...Parents who want their children to attend all-white schools should not be allowed to use public funds to pursue this preference...
...In sparsely settled areas and in smaller towns geography will have to remain one of the organizing principles of education...
...In the elementary and secondary schools as in the colleges, the power of lay boards of control appears to be diminishing...
...This is not to say that poor Negroes accept segregation willingly...
...Students will tend to view college as they now view secondary school: mainly as a way-station from which one progresses to the next level...
...The old teachers college in which the student never met a creative scholar or scientist is slowly on the way out...
...Indeed, academicians are more and more looked to by these interests to mediate between their traditional claims and the newer, more cosmopolitan and "national" vision of society which many members of these groups see emerging...
...The reasons for this trend deserve careful attention, for until they are understood it is impossible to map a realistic program of educational reform, radical or otherwise...
...This will be clear to teachers at all levels, and the result will be an increasingly widespread desire to work in a major university where most research will be done, where most graduate students will be trained, and where the rest of the educational system will be increasingly shaped...
...Today's students study languages in elementary school which were once saved for secondary school, they read books in high school that were once read only in college, and they write papers and perform experiments in college which would once have been reserved to graduate students...
...But such colleges and such students have less status than their more academically rigorous competitors and are increasingly on the defensive...
...But for the most part they are not ready to organize and they are more interested in new buildings and good teachers than in integration per se...
...While much of the controversy over teachers' unions, strikes, and "professional sanctions" has focused on salaries, the teachers' right to a direct voice in shaping school policy has also been a vital issue...
...It is therefore usually assumed that the cure for poverty is an educational system which gives everyone the skills for doing some kind of valuable work...
...But the fact is that college trustees and administrators are more and more responsive to the collective views of the academic profession, less and less to other pressures...
...If "the worst" gets better, then middle-class parents will want "the best" improved even more...
...certainly it is better than a society which demands and values physical brawn or the right ancestors...
...Already this is happening in some measure: from elementary school to graduate school, the definition of institutional responsibilities and possibilities has been enormously expanded since 1900, and further expansion seems likely...
...Costs have in recent years risen much faster than personal incomes...
...Thus the faculty have more independent initiative, and the trustees and administrators are more dependent on the faculty to bring in money...
...First, the public must be protected against fraud...
...This may not be such a bad thing...
...As a result, many young people spend years in institutions they hate, learn very little, and drop out too soon to have much chance of realizing their potential as adults...
...If the schools want to end poverty, they must not only improve the position of the poor pupils...
...The present trend will probably continue...
...Rather, he is encouraged to accept the definitions and demands of others, and is rewarded according to his ability and willingness to adapt to these demands...
...A second limitation emerges from the fact that in many parts of the country there is only one school within bussing distance of most families...
...Nor is it the instinctive faith of laymen in educators...
...It is also apparent, if to a lesser extent, in the elementary and secondary schools...
...Other restrictions would inevitably be imposed by the courts and by legislators...
...Bigness has many advantages, especially for the student with unusual talent, energy or interests who can master a complex environment...
...In most cases he can go underground only at great cost to himself, and elsewhere only at great cost to his parents...
...As this example suggests, the social role of education is at bottom a political rather than a technical question...
...Indeed, the relationship between graduate and undergraduate instruction is in many respects paralleled by that between undergraduate and secondary education...
...A college professor has a great deal of freedom to teach what he pleases, and a school teacher has some, but neither is free to decide how to teach—whether in large groups or small, in departmentalized courses or others, one day a week or five...
...As a practical matter, however, this purity would have to be diluted in certain respects...
...Americans have always tended to assume that good schools could offset all the numerous defects of American homes, churches, and employers...
...The world is changing too fast for parents to feel confident about imposing the values of their own youth on their children...
...Partly this is a financial change...
...Later, with the help of federal grants in-aid, vocational training won a place in the secondary schools...
...What is the alternative...
...The rising bargaining power of the academic profession and its rising prestige in the eyes of laymen have reduced the control of the special interest groups which founded most colleges: the Catholics and Baptists, the Negroes and Irish, the teachers and farmers, the feminists and aristocrats, the home town boosters and regional patriots...
...If high schools sanction cars and cigarettes as normal to adolescent life, most parents will do the same...
...First, it seems to me the radical must ask how such a system of education is going to affect the character of the larger society...
...Will they stimulate any new ones...
...The consequences of central administration vary, of course, according to the administrative system and the philosophy on which it operates...
...These changes have many by-products...
...First, and perhaps most important, such a system will be increasingly organized and run on the assumption that students at each level are going on to the next level...
...They seek to re-create this model in the college, both by adding graduate programs and by reorganizing undergraduate programs in the image of graduate ones...
...As a result, the faculty has more leverage in its struggle to impose graduate school standards on undergraduates...
...At the same time, the proportion of high school students who graduate and go on to college is rising steadily, and this means that more and more high school students care about good grades and can be forced to do whatever academic tasks their teachers set for them...
...In such a market the consumer has a reasonable hope of getting what he wants-if the government gives him enough money to pay for it...
...If another principal wants to use McGuffey's reader, and if enough teachers and parents support this quaint notion, they should be free to do that too...
...These trends will affect students in several ways...
...Politicians in some areas might well feel that public funds should not be used to support and promote academic elitism, at least among the young...
...As academics become more involved in the affairs of society, their assumptions about what young apprentices should be doing also seem to become somewhat broader...
...They also shape the state of mind which this imprimatur symbolizes: acceptance of the needs of your employer-client, be he the Pentagon or a neurotic four year old, as legitimate and inevitable...
...Efforts to provide government scholarships which would give such students a wider range of choice have come to little...
...It is also clear that they are not set up to meet this responsibility...
Vol. 13 • March 1966 • No. 2
