Purpose: Explain the primary purpose of schools so that people understand that reform of schools will never end unless people themselves are reformed. Schools are interrelated and dependent on so many other things that affects students’ learning.
Central Messages:
1. All throughout history Americans have felt unsatisfied with the achievements of their schools.
2. It would be wrong to assume that schools have and always will fall short of their mission.
3. Present complaints are reactions to hard-won reforms of the past.
4. School criticism is not new.
5. Educational institutions have shifted in their function and the students that attend have changed their attitudes towards schools and its purpose.
6. Schools do not have full power of their students’ lives.
7. The essential purpose of schooling is to develop the powers of intelligence: thinking, knowing, reflecting, observing, imagining, appreciating, questioning, and judging.
Validations/Applications:
1. Low state of learning, poor training for teachers, insufficient funding, inadequate school buildings, and apathy of the public.
2. The educational problems of the present are different from those of the past.
3. Though the educational preparation of teachers is more extensive than ever, the educations of teachers is still a subject of intense criticism. Realization that a degree does not guarantee that its bearer knows how or what to teach, loves teaching or loves learning. Teachers’ unions.
4. There are assumptions about what schools should and can do. Criticisms have shifted as assumptions about the goals and potentialities of schools have changed.
5. Schools have become settings for expression of militant particularism along racial, religious, ethnic, sexual, cultural, and linguistic lines. Schools are a stage for expression of militant particularism acts rather than the cause of their appearance.
6. Even total institutions, like prisons, have difficulty shaping lives and minds where they fully control the people that are in them. Schools are interrelated with, and dependent on, families, churches, the media, peer groups, and other agencies of influence. Teachers, administrators, students, and communities vary, and therefore schools vary.
7. The first purpose is to encourage and guide each person in the cultivation of intelligence and the development of talents, interests, and abilities.
Values:
Support from other sources
Encouragement
The powers of intelligence
Critical thinking
Responsibility
Personal Reformation