The Anomalies of Modern American Schooling

The Enigma of Public Schools - The Episodes

I. Why?
-The Anomalies of Modern American Schooling-

The series will begin in the present. In an attempt to frame the debate in as graphic a manner as possible, we will present a series of anomalies: How is it that in a country as developed as the United States, reading scores have declined steadily since World War II? Math equally so? That 15 percent of public school children carry weapons to school each month? The incidence of sexual abuse of students by faculty as well as other students is on the rise? Testing has never been able to predict a child's success in later life? School texts are massively inaccurate? A disproportionate number of children, specifically minorities, are relegated to "special education" classes? In comparative tests with the children of other developed countries, ours regularly fall in the bottom 25 percent?

The evidence will be examined and debated by parents, students, teachers, school officials, and experts. A clip from Stand and Deliver, for example, will illustrate math teacher Jaime Escalante's method of teaching calculus to "underachieving" and underprivileged Chicano students.

Parents and teachers from affluent Littleton, Colorado, home of Columbine High School will talk with their peers from Chicago's South Side about the anguish and cause of school violence. And the question will be raised: Is there a fourth purpose of schooling that might explain many or even all of these phenomena?

II. How Did It Get This Way?
-A Brief History of Public Schooling-

This episode will begin by drawing portraits of schooling in Classical Greece, Rome, medieval France, England, Germany, and Italy.

We will then focus on Colonial America and explore one of the main assertions of the series: that an economy reflects the visionary goals of a populace and determines the shape of schooling. And when those economic forces veer away in opposition to a culture's vision of itself, the society in question becomes dysfunctional.

We will then take a closer look at the historical imperatives that have shaped our schools, beginning with the Prussian discovery that simplifying childhood and removing its responsibilities lead to a docile, tractable workforce. We will move through the work of John Dewey, Horace Mann, and William Torrey Harris. And we will focus on the key moments in American schooling: the creation of the one-room school house; the invention of compulsory schooling; the start of the factory system and its cousin, the factory school; the building of the great teachers colleges; the advent of private prep schools and academies for the rich; the beginning of standardized testing; and the invention of textbooks.

We will finish with a look at what we have created—a sort of balance sheet-evaluating the human product that we produce in America today after a dozen years of our brand of schooling.

III. What Else Is Possible?
-Options Within and Without the System-

The series will build to its climax by surveying the workable alternatives that have evolved here and abroad. Part III will begin with looks at the amazingly successful Amish system in Lancaster, Pa., and the Mondragon cooperative in the Basque region of Spain. We will look at the different theories of childhood as presented by the Harmony School in Bloomington, Ind., Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf System, the Montessori package, the explosively growing homeschool movement, traditional private schooling, viable private sector possibilities, and alternatives that have emerged within the public school system itself as expressed by the experiments of Escalante, Collins, and Gatto. We will again follow the lives of children as they learn how to become independent, self-sustaining individuals.

We will summarize the work ahead, make suggestions, exhort people to action, and ask one final question: How shall we prepare our children to live in America?

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