Schools in Trouble

...and educators would do better to analogize to professions where political problems are daily insistent—for example, the foreign service—if they would be at all realistic about the conditions under which they work...

...Conant and Dr...

...The responsibility rests on every citizen of the land...

...In most instances, no further discussion of purpose intrudes...

...When conflicts over purpose do arise, however, as in the case of abortion, euthanasia, or sterilization, the same political problems that bedevil the educators quickly descend on the physicians, as the English jurist, Glanville Williams, persuasively notes in his recent volume, The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law...

...Heaven knows, we need better trained, better paid, better educated, and more courageous teachers...

...and continued professionalization is certainly one way to get them...

...An educationist long critical of his colleagues, he has little faith in Jeffersonian exhortation as a basis for educational reform...

...For the schools have been subjected to massive pressures in recent years, and many a locality has taxed itself to the limit only to find that the children keep coming, crowding classrooms to capacity and overflowing into church basements, barns, abandoned railway cars, and surplus circus tents...

...Though their books may appear quite different at first glance, they are essentially similar in the political questions they raise: What is really wrong with American schools...

...The responsibility cannot be passed to the state legislatures or to Congress...

...The Child, the Parent and the State represents his effort to locate contemporary educational discussion within the context of our peculiar history as a nation, our unique political system, and the divided world in which we live...

...Now, this may be ancient lore in American education, but it is good to hear a man of Conant's wisdom state it so optimistically and well...

...Professionalization may shift the political balance in education, but it cannot meet the political problem...

...The public's mandate to the medical profession is clear: save and extend life...

...At the present time," he concludes, "public education presents a paradox: the work of teachers is dominated by political considerations, but the teachers themselves are political nonentities...

...The need is to transform teachers into political animals so that their work can be based on professional interest instead of political considerations...

...A whole new financial structure will have to be designed if the schools are to meet the demands of the Sixties...

...In these two books Dr...

...The church-state problem has sharpened with rising parochial school enrollments, quite apart from the religious affiliation of any candidate...

...But it is difficult to accept Lieberman's assumption that Americans are as agreed on the purposes of education as they are on the purposes of medicine...

...The appeal to a diffuse citizenry to save our schools is futile," he writes, "not because the schools do not need saving but because most worthwhile educational reforms will have to be initiated and carried out by the teachers...

...Desegregation has been in the headlines for almost a decade...

...Conant is well known as a commentator on American education...

...Analogizing to the doctors is common indoor sport among teachers, and there is a measure of truth to the analogy...

...What should be done about them...

...Conant, of course, is well aware of this, and warns that only a drastic overhaul of our state taxing machinery, or a vast program of federal assistance, can save the schools from steady deterioration...

...Reviewed by Lawrence A. Cremin For the first time in our history, education may emerge as one of the central issues of the coming Presidential campaign...

...but their diagnoses are as different as the cures they prescribe...

...and granted all the attendant difficulties, there is no better judge of the public interest in the long run than the public itself...

...and while local citizen interest cannot guarantee imaginative political action, it can be an important step toward generating it...

...Philip Willkie, son of the late Presidential candidate, may have written a portentous letter last December when he advised 2600 state officials that Republicans "have an opportunity to lead the party and our nation to victory if they will assume leadership in developing policies of public education that will utilize our nation's mental resources...

...Lieberman is frankly skeptical of Conant's approach...

...and a television film dramatizing the recommendations of that volume is appearing widely under National Education Association auspices...

...But it breaks down at the crucial point of purpose...

...Without political power, teachers will never be able to protect the integrity of their work...

...We shall probably have to double our educational expenditures during the next ten years, and no amount of tinkering with local property taxes can produce the requisite funds...

...Both authors are convinced that reform is needed...

...His book, like its predecessor, Education as a Profession, is essentially a plea for an autonomous teaching profession with power to decide what should be taught in the schools...

...And most important, perhaps, who ought to do it...

...The resultant variations in educational quality have been scandalous, as the vastly uneven achievements on the National Merit Scholarship Examinations have so amply demonstrated...

...Certainly the public is ready for it...

...Given the classical relationship of education and politics, the argument over purpose will continue...

...Conant is convinced that despite grave shortcomings in the schools we can develop the talents of all our youth without basic changes in the present structure of education, provided that state by state and locality by locality the people do their part...

...Experts who serve the public must ultimately be responsible to someone...

...The analogy is important, since much of Lieberman's book is an attempt to apply the successful political strategies of other professions—notably medicine—to teaching...

...And a spate of books, magazine articles, and television programs has aired every conceivable ailment of the schools, real and imaginary...

...The road to better schools will be paved by the collective action of the local citizenry in thousands of communities...

...Taxpayer revolts across the country testify to the mounting financial pressures caused by bulging enrollments at every educational level...

...Lieberman both address themselves to Willkie's point...

...Non-professional determination of the curriculum, he argues, is as unthinkable as nonprofessional determination of the techniques of brain surgery...

...His book, The American High School Today, was a best seller through much of 1959...