more important in coming years. The anticipated revolution wrought by audiotapes and videotapes has not yet occurred but it is certainly a technical possibility, although not yet clearly a psychic one. Nonschool institutions still are the chief remaining element in the educational system. Most important among these are libraries, which in this century have become publicly supported and nearly universal throughout the Nation instead of being concentrated among the wealthy and in urban areas. No longer novelties as they were at the turn of the century, social settlements still provide important educational services, as do such other pioneers as county and home demonstration agents. The list could go on, but further additions would not modify the essential picture of the American educational system as a conglomerate of local schools assisted by other local institutions. What is expected of it? Undoubtedly the most serious problem the American educational system has ever faced is the gap between public expectations of it and its performance. A recent book on the history of American education in the late 19th and early 20th century is titled The Imperfect Panacea, and that is a superbly succinct account of the fate of the American educational system. rom Puritan times to F the present, educa tion has been asked to solve all kinds of religious, national, social, economic, and even intellectual problems. In the 17th century, edu cation was intimately tied to religious salvation: Puritans believed salvation and ignorance were contradictory. By the late 18th century, Thomas Jefferson, more concerned with the problems of this life than the next, looked to education to provide the informed citizenry upon which his notions of the democratic republic rested. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization," he wrote, "it expects what never was and never will be." Concern with the republic and with the citizenry's commitment to it prompted Noah Webster to write his "Grammatical Institute of the English Language, Part I" (less ostentatiously known as the Blue-Backed Speller). There Webster tried to insure that through the widespread use of these materials, the American child would grow up with a body of patriotic allusions common to his fellows. "Let the first word he lisps be Washington," he urged. Later in the 19th century, Horace Mann preached the gospel of the possibilities of the public was not as serious as it became in the 20th century. For the first time, literacy-and literacy at a reasonably high level-was crucial. It became very difficult to make a living without it and therefore very obvious when persons could not get or hold jobs because they did not have the necessary skills. The blame was placed on the schools for failing to educate such people properly. Accepting the Mann dogma that the public (or "common") schools brought all children together, the public asked the schools to undertake those difficult social tasks that the society had been unable to deal with itself. For example, when prohibition against driving after any drinking of alcoholic beverages. Only recently has any serious attention been given by manufacturers to improving the safety of their vehicles. Despite widespread acceptance of driver education in schools, auto accidents have not declined. V. A far more serious example of expecting the schools to do what the rest of the society either did not want to do or found itself unable to do has been the racial integration issue. Since the Brown Board of Education decision in 1954, schools throughout the United States have been wrestling with the question of bringing together in classrooms children whose parents have never associated at work, at church, or at play. Since the schools not only were supposed to make the children literate but also to "socialize" them, it is not surprising that many parents expressed extreme reluctance to see their offspring associate with children whose parents they did not see. Again the schools were asked to assume an impossible burden. If Americans had really wanted integration in the Fifties (and there is little evidence they did, although many said they did), the areas to have moved on were real estate and job recruitment. In short, the principal expectations for the educational system have been both academic and social. Too often the social problems the school was supposed to solve have overwhelmed it so that it was unable to resolve the academic. Probably the period of most intense criticism of the American educational system came in the early Fifties at the height of the "life adjustment movement" when the critics sought more rigorous academic programs. Few today would maintain that schools are the sole place to learn how to adjust to life; that complicated task is not likely to be accomplished between the ages of six and 16. That such a program could even be inaugurated, however, is indicative of the unwieldy obligations the schools had become accustomed to accepting. In that case, unlike many of the others, they were told to lay the burden down. What does it do? Despite the fact that the educational system has not brought justice, affluence, and personal fulfillment to all Americans, it has some remarkable achievements. To an important degree it is responsible for America's international intellectual leadership. Obviously many other nations have well-trained scholars, but none is the academic mecca that the United States is today. This has not always been true. Until early in the 20th century the United States suffered an unfavorable academic balance of trade; more American scholars studied abroad than foreigners did here. The shift came primarily as a result of the emphasis upon research at American universities in the years immediately surrounding World War I, a time that sapped the economic, spiritual, and human energies of the previous leaders: Germany, England, and France. American scholarship was also augmented considerably by the arrival of political refugees, particularly from Russia (both as a result of the pogroms and later from the Bolshevik revolution) and later from fascist Germany, Italy, and Spain. Many of these émigrés greatly enhanced the intellectual and cultural life of America, and it is to the credit of the much-maligned educational institutions that they (the universities, in particular) included many of these distinguished scholars on their faculties and enrolled many of their children as students, often with scholarships. In addition to the substantial intellectual contribution made by these émigrés was their social impact. Until their arrival college and university faculties, were except for the Catholic institutions, had been composed typically of persons of multi-generation American lineage of Protestant background. Many of the refugees from Hitler, of course, Jewish, and when they joined American faculties, they were often the first Jews ever to have been appointed to permanent positions. This generation of émigré Jewish intellectuals in turn helped to open the barriers for American Jews to widespread participation in American academic life. Discrimination against Catholics, always less systematic than against Jews, also diminished, but moves to bring blacks and women into the mainstream of American academic life remained for later decades. There is ample evidence that the American educational system has done well at the top. Comparative studies with other nations show that the academically superior graduates of American secondary schools rate favorably with the top students of more selective secondary programs in other countries. What of the great mass that America attempts to educate? On the whole the degree of success with them is considerable, even though never as great as hoped. Despite the immense diversity of the U.S. population, nearly all are literate, and 87 percent of the age group five to 17 are enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools, an increase of 30 percentage points between 1870 and 1970. At the present time over half the high school graduates are continuing their formal educations. Most impressive is the fact that "streaming" (requiring students to make an educational choice, such as a technical institute, which will later limit their vocational choice) is much less characteristic of the U.S. educational system than that of any other industrialized nation. has In addition to educating masses of young people (and large numbers of older ones as well, in community colleges and continuing education programs), the American educational system specialized in enlarging and broadening curriculum. One can study nearly anything in the United States today and receive academic credit for it. From the constricted offerings of the elementary school at the turn of the century, which typically provided an unpalatable mix of reading, arithmetic, penmanship, Bible study, history, occasionally science, and always "rote work" (memorization), elementary children today look at newts under microscopes, write their own stories, learn arithmetic with a computer, and replace history with economics based on experiences in the local stores. Even more dramatic changes have occurred in the curriculum of the colleges, where a century ago most colleges gave their students little if any choice (electives) in their entire four-year program. Today it is a rare college that requires more than freshman English, possibly some science and foreign language, and a major to be included among the 120 odd credits that make up the Bachelor's degree. At the turn of the century such languages as French or German were new additions to the curriculum and considered barely respectable academically. Today they have faded, as Greek and Latin before them, to be replaced in student interest by majors in urban studies, ecology, or psychology. Even more dramatic curricular changes have occurred outside the liberal arts framework in the development during this century of professional schools, especially schools focusing on agriculture, education, library science, home economics, and journalism. Formerly each of these skills was learned on an informal apprenticeship basis, but now they are degree-granting programs. All these courses make up the "system." uses ho children and a great educational attendance has zoomed in this century, especially for the post-elementary group. Estimates vary, but a reasonable one is that less than five percent of the college age children were in school in America in 1900. Today over 40 percent are. Secondary school enrollments practically doubled every decade from 1890 to 1920, when they began to level off. Although much of this increase was of course due to growth in the population, more of it could be attributed to the increasing tendency for children to remain in school beyond the eighth grade. Currently, for the first time in the Nation's history, school attendance is not growing. Segments of the educational system have experienced periods of contraction or no growth in the past, notably the elementary schools in the Thirties and Forties, which were reflecting the low birth rate of the Thirties, and the colleges in the late 19th century, which were reflecting a general disenchantment with higher education and an economic depression. At present, however, neither the elementary nor the secondary school population is expected to increase but rather to shrink, a result of the drop in the birth rate, the absence of significant immigration, and the already established pattern of full participation in the elementary and secondary schools. College enrollment predictions which are subject to much more fluctuation, since such institutions can enroll students of all ages and since considerably less than half the eligible population has ever attended them call for only modest gains, and these gains probably will be chiefly in the public institutions. Statistically children from middle class homes are over-represented in the college population in the United States and this is particularly true of male children from middle class homes. Thus whereas women currently constitute more than 50 percent of the Nation's population, they represent only a little more than 44 percent of the undergraduate enrollment. Bright girls from economically depressed circumstances form the largest category of persons who might be expected to profit from college but who do not do so. The male-female discrepancy is even greater at the doctorate level, where women currently receive only about 18 percent of the doctorates awarded annually. Until recently blacks did not attend college in anything like their proportion in the population, but in the last few years their undergraduate enrollment proportion has come closer to approximating their proportion of the population. They are still far behind at the doctorate level, however, receiving less than one percent of the doctorates awarded annually, although they constitute over 11 percent of the population. If one assumes that intellectual capacity is distributed evenly throughout the population, then it is clear that the school performance is affected by factors other than sheer intellect. Such basic characteristics as race, class, and sex, as well as such less tangible influences as motivation and teacher expectation, remain important variables affecting academic success and intellectual growth. Over 30 years ago George S. Counts asked, "Dare the schools build a new social order?" He had hoped for an affirmative answer, but the reply then and now is negative. Despite the disclaimer that the schools are not primarily avenues of social mobility in this country, a recent incident involving the U.S.S.R., a nation that has made a to genuine effort eliminate class distinctions in its society, is illustrative. In 1973 a group of six American professors and one journalist met in the Soviet Union with a counterpart group there to discuss domestic problems of mutual concern. At the opening session each participant - they ranged in age from early 30s to mid 50s was asked to introduce himself or herself and to say a bit about family background. The Americans, all of whom had been educated at Harvard, Yale, or Columbia, represented a more diverse group in terms of family background than the Soviets. Over half of the Americans were the second generation of their family in this country, and less than half came from families who were professionals. The Soviets, on the other hand, almost unanimously came from families in which the parents had been professionals and had attended college. This was all the more unusual since the proportion of Russians attending college of their parents' generation was very small indeed. Although our educational system clearly has serious limitations as a vehicle for social mobility, it is noteworthy that the most prestigious universities in this country have not limited their enrollments, particularly at graduate level, to children of the upper middle class. the ho runs it? Two of the most distinctive of features the American educational system are related to its organization. One is the extraordinary degree of lay control that still exists in school systems in this country, and the other is the system's highly decentralized structure. Lay control through school boards and boards of trustees made up typically of community leaders dates from the time when the number of educated persons in a community was very small, and the one or two schoolmasters (or more rarely, schoolmistresses) were not regarded as among the most enlightened citizens. Until the 20th century the school teacher commonly was a young, single person (no one could support a family on a teacher's wage) either en route to a career or marriage, or when the teacher was older, a misfit for either. Such persons were not likely to inspire the confidence of the statesmen of the community, who therefore undertook responsibility for the schools themselves. A county in central Indiana exemplifies the school board model: When the first public school system was organized in the community of Franklin in 1866, it was supplanting miscellaneous educational endeavors that had been carried on by the local Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, each of which had operated its own school at one time or another. The town fathers accommodated to the history of rivalry among the faiths by naming the pastors of the three churches as the first Franklin school board. Two years later they were succeeded by the county judge, the local doctor, and the leading Franklin merchant, a trio that looked after the schools for many years, hiring and firing superintendents of schools at two and three year intervals. Tension between the lay boards of control and the professional educators has tended to increase during the 20th century with the growth of the professional educator group. In many large systems the professional educators making up the established, continuing bureaucracy of the school system have become the effective determinants of educational policy. Although they are nominally responsible to the superintendent of schools, this official occupies such an exposed and vulnerable position in the community that his (one can say "his" advisedly, since over 99 percent of school superintendents in this country are male) incumbency is likely to be no more than three or four years. The professional educators making up the staff of the system, on the other hand, usually are protected by tenure, and their position is therefore much more secure and their influence more sustained. Functionally that is where the power lies in a school system. Lay school boards and superintendents can enunciate all the reforms they want, but unless the teachers change their ways, nothing will happen. It is often difficult to change an experienced teacher's view about pedagogical method or children's abilities. One of the most persistent tensions in school systems has been that between parents of school children and the policymakers of the schools, whoever they have been. Generally parents have played a rather small role in setting priorities for the schools, and when the schools did not seem to be educating their children satisfactorily, they have complained. Such parental dissatisfaction was evident during the 1950s in the denunciation progressive education by the Council for Basic Education, a group that included many parents who were not educators. More recently the school decentralization controversy in New York City has been marked by vivid complaints from some parents that the centrally controlled schools were not responsive to the needs of their children. of Who pays for it? The question of control of the American educational system is inevitably closely linked with the question of finance. There is very little nationalized central authority over education in the United States, and proportionately there is also relatively little Federal expenditure for elementary and secondary education. Funding for higher education, particularly for research carried on in colleges and universities, is much more likely to come from Federal sources than is support for the schools, though the latter has grown. Forty years ago nearly 83 percent of the funds allocated to public schools came from local governments, with 17 percent coming from State government and 0.3 |