Education is in the stranges For ...

Education is in the stranges For more than a year the nation has been awash in a rush of reports and studies upon the state of American sects We have seen it examined by means of national commissions which say the "Nation [is] at Risk" and on task forces that insist forward "action for excellence." We are coached along the way by way of the very formal Carnegie Foundation and the real informal Group of Fifty. And of course these are not the alone evidence of national anguish. A gaggle of state and local reports follows the agenda closer to our respective households Business barons and social scientists, public policy makers and skeptical taxpayers are wasing into the swamp to grapple with educational reform in his or her hold way. And more reports of their combat are nevertheless to come, some of them already public in consequence of recently published "interim findings." within it all, education promises to be single of the three or four top domestic issues in the 1984 election campaign.

Although former Commissioner of Education Harold Howe, II, period of times this "heady wine for educators," he is also quick to note the "fickle decrease and flow of the tides of enthusiasm for education" which have been particularly evident for one-third of a hundred years in this country. President Bart Giamatti of Yale University is equal more biting:

"The gaudy halftime display put on the last six month at the strutting incumbents and aspirants for office, followed as always at massed trombones and xylophones of the pres will probably do no real harm, although the racket will be tremendous for awhile . .

"[In fact] national opinion leaders and federal officials are paralyzed, baffled by way of the proper demands for partnership, misspent in the joys of preemptive ideological strikes and in distrust of what their catalogue of personss tell them is deeply important. As the geographical division fragmented, without serious moral authority from any quarter of public leadership, contends to pay attention again to the means for elementary and secondary education, mistakes will be made [even as] more [i]or[/i] less ideas will be trumpeted . . as the panacea for all time, world without end"

Obviously the subdue has touched a raw vigor or two, a little more painfully for any than others, but eliciting a marked replication in every quarter just the same. Not all of the reports shelter the same ground or make the same recommendations, still for our purposes today, may I cite from the most publicized of them, submitted to Secretary T H Bell in April 1983 according to the National Commission on superior goodness in Education. Its title is in its opening line.

"Our Nation is at risk. Our one time unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken on competitors throughout the world. This report is disquieted with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the enigma but it is the common that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American race that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools

and corporations have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its race the educational foundations of our society are directly being eroded by a rushing tide of mediocrity that threatens our to a high degree future as a Nation and a the community What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur--others are matching and surpassing our education attainments.

"If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose forward America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have uniform squandered the gains in pupil achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support methods which helped make those gains possible. We have, in result been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

"Our society and its educational institutions be seen to have lost sight of the basic senses of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort indigenceed to attain them."

The, to demonstrate that the "basic ends of schooling" have indeed been thrown away the Commission reports that the Japanese make more automobiles than we do, the toward the south Koreans have better steel mills than we do, the Germans make finer machine tools than we do, and in the way that forth. Thus we are told, our nation is at risk.

My interest after nearly a year of reading of that kind reports and listening to them being endlessly discussed, is that while a nation may be at risk, it is manifestly clear that a remarkably important American notion is at on a level greater risk.

What is missing?

As evidenced on their conspicuous and wholesale absence from virtually each one of these reports and proposals, we have obviously relegated all the moral and civic (read "civilizing") values of education to the surpassingly back seat of the big golden bus--if indeed they are still being allowed to ride at all--while prominently seated up head are the real necessities, those which give primacy to our economic penurys our escalating tehcnological needs; in short those that are unabashedly utilitarian." As Professor Douglas Sloan has said, "First a living, then art and morality; first survival for our financially beleaguered literary institution [i]or[/i] seminary of learnings and universities, then a philosophy of higher education." If single doesn't believe it, just ask the Education Commission of the States. lately a university president serving there said. "I really believe there has got to be a resurgence of public commitment to education in this abiding habitation and I think it's fundamental if we really do want to papal court economic growth, advancement in national defense and an increase in productivity. . . This has got to become the nation's number undivided priority."