Search

Like pieces of handblown glass, each shaped by local artisans to fit a special niche, Career Education programs in scores of individual school districts are beginning to create a national mosaic in which fundamental precepts are clearly discernible. No two programs are exactly alike, nor should they be. No two school systems, student populations, community resources, or labor markets are exactly alike. Yet the emerging picture suggests that the basic elements of Career Education are being understood and supported in varying degrees across the country, by school personnel, some colleges and universities, and virtually all state education agencies. Thus, with many good starts as well as some shaky ones, a concept that was offered as a promising idea two years ago is fast becoming a reality. When Career Education realizes its promise, it will change the lives of millions of children and young people now in school, plus a great many adults who elect to upgrade or change their career skills in mid-life. To accomplish its objective, Career Education must have the support of teachers and professors. Underlying Career Education is the conviction that our schools and colleges have a responsibility to students not only to teach the

The importance of education to the individual has been elevated to one of the highest values in our democratic society. A primary goal of education is to offer each individual the opportunity to develop his abilities to the fullest capacity. . . . The great basic goals of education are to foster individual fulfillment and to nurture the free, rational, and responsible men and women without whom our kind of society cannot endure. [WILBUR J. COHEN]1

front of their groups, each lecturing on the topic of African culture. Traditional classroom? No. This is a new open-space school building-no interior walls, carpet under foot, bright colors, resource centers, all the materials you can use to be an effective open-education teacher. Yet these teachers have artificially created three separate classrooms, one next to the other, imposing a "front" of the room and four invisible walls which keep out neither sight nor sound.1 This is an openspace school, but this is not open education. Indeed, this is a situation in which the design of the school interferes with what the teachers are trying to do. By the same token, four real walls do not preclude open education. In both cases, the crucial issue is the relationship between the philosophy of education and how the physical setting can be used to implement that philosophy. There are many statements available describing a variety of

I had taught for ten years before I had a single black child in my class, and, indeed, it was a single black child who came to our school and to my class. Alma Franklin, poor southern farm girl, integrated Blossom Hill School all by herself. How is it that it took me ten years to become the teacher of a black child? Easy. Half of that time was spent teaching in New Orleans schools before desegregation, and the rest in a white northern suburb.

adulthood and call for the establishment of alternative environments (p. 3). They develop a frame of reference for debate over such alternatives (p. 145). Our review adopts this frame of reference but enlarges it to include not youth alone, but also the societal macrocosm in which youth is just one ingredient, inseparable from, and interdependent with, people of all ages. Drawing upon my own sociological view of age stratification,1 I shall suggest that the proposed debate can benefit from empirical knowledge about other age strata2 and from emerging theories of age-related social structures and processes. Such a broadened perspective can focus the pertinent questions; heighten the potential for innovation in school, workplace, family, and society at large; and point to wider implications of the particular changes proposed by the panel. Most immediately, the panel's provocative formulation of the plight of the young calls to mind the parallel plight of the old. The transition from youth to adulthood is inevitably followed by the transition from adulthood to old age. Like all life-course transitions, these two are interlocked within the lives of individuals as they age and within the age strata of the dynamic society. Any change in one evokes a change in the other. Thus, when the Coleman panel suggests restructuring the institutions

There may well exist somewhere an educational body which, like its counterparts in politics and the arts, takes upon itself to name a Man of the Year in Education. If so, it would likely be tempted to name Ivan Illich its man of the decade. Despite the sneers of those who asserted that his ideas would never find a widespread hearing, people are talking about learning exchanges, educational vouchers, and deschooling society. Articles are appearing on the man and his work in popular magazines and scholarly journals, and university seminars are studying the practical and theoretical value of his various concepts. As for me, I have been receiving from everywhere in France requests for information about Illich's center at Cuernavaca. Quite in keeping with the personality of the man, the Illich phenomenon has burst upon the world with the energy of a volcano or an earthquake.

In the past decade, there has been a growing body of literature on the concepts of alternative schools, free schools, open schools, and nongraded schools. Unfortunately, there has been little documentation of the process by which these educational options have been accepted and implemented in individual schools. This paper focuses on a strategy for developing an alternative school and on ways of facilitating the planning process. In Pinehurst, North Carolina, this process began when the board members of a newly formed private school developed a long-range building plan that included a new facility for a proposed program for kindergarten through ninth grade. In the course of interviewing architects for the design of the new school, the building committee encountered one architect who suggested a participatory planning approach involving mem

Adolescence is marked by a struggle to establish an individual identity. This includes achieving sexual identity, forming values independent of parents, insisting on freedom and privacy, and attaining some degree of vocational identity.' This search for identity is undoubtedly confounded with the transformation in values which, as Getzels indicates, has been taking place in America during the last few decades.2 Teachers who developed their values a decade or more ago would possess values different from those being developed by their students today. Thus the classroom is a forum which brings together teachers, representing more-traditional values, and students immersed in a search for an emergent identity which is their own. Mannheim viewed the later high school years as a period of "questioning and reflecting on things."3 He thought this period occurred near the age of 17 because then "life's problems begin to be located in the 'present' and are experienced as such." He concluded that the "up-to-datedness" of youth is a function of their

Our report is based on a perspective about the settings in which youth find themselves in modern society. That perspective is, in brief, that certain institutions outside the school which once served extensive socialization functions for youth now are much less able to do so. These institutions are the family, the neighborhood, and informal or casual work settings. Schooling, once an auxiliary institution to these others, has expanded to fill the vacuum. The result is an ever-lengthening period of life during which young people are physicially mature but unnecessary to the economic functioning of the family and the society, and kept as dependents to train for self-improvement in school.

The flow upward in any culture of the oppressive elements, the agonies and realities of dehumanization, is not unlike the growth of plant cells. Only a few people see the seeds; the rest wait until the flowered stalk shoots high enough to pick, and then someone turns over the land, places the seeds deep inside it all over again, and the rest wait until something grows, as it did before. Each year a bit of dropping, a cutting, a spillover from the top falls on the ground and makes its way into the earth where maybe it touches the seeds and nurtures them in some way, and maybe it doesn't. It happens in the social order something like this too. Suddenly the students at prestigious colleges clamor about the prison-like conditions of their schools. The food is called institutional, classes are oversubscribed, teachers are unable to spend time with students, and then, incongruous as it seems, the school is called a prison. From deep down in the culture, the barely heard murmurings of the truly neglected and hurt people have been transformed into something powerful to be used as a new type of food for those who are already well nourished. Rich children pick the fruit, but poor children are

Despite the interest in methods of achieving integration in urban, secondary schools, there is a lack of information about what activities black and white students who are presently in desegregated schools engage in together. Teachers and administrators, and even visitors to these schools, report that although the schools are desegregated, the students are not integrated. Blacks come to school, attend class, eat and hang around the halls with other blacks; whites do the same things with other whites. But while this may appear to be the situation it is only a part of it. Anyone who works in a desegregated school can point to may instances of individual interaction among blacks and whites. They are together for six or more hours each day; they share classes, activities, and sports. Even those without contacts have a basic understanding of how to behave toward a student of the "other" race. If this were not so, these schools would be in a constant state of riotous disruption. Despite many newspaper accounts to the contrary, they are not. Notwithstanding the fact that blacks and whites may seem to ignore each other, they seem to accommodate to each other's presence in the schools.

Youth: Transition to Adulthood is a perplexing policy document. There appear to be enough proposals for change to accommodate the interests of any number of policymakers and administrators who are searching for ways to reaffirm society's obligations toward youth. Closer examination, however, suggests that the authors take seriously only one, or possibly two, of these proposals: a major shift in responsibility for socialization of youth, in possible tandem with some form of voucher. We shall address the first point-that of shifting the responsibility of socialization from the schools to the workplaces of society-and discuss some possible reactions by five audiences: parents, students, taxpayers, teachers, and legislators.

impasse in which the teacher cannot teach and the students cannot learn. One teacher sums up her frustrations at a New York City school in this way: "My classes are devoted to trying to get the kids to open their notebooks, stay seated, stop talking, stop fighting. . . . The dynamics of the classroom situation are overwhelming; they must be studied and solved before anything can be taught and learned. For me the idea of trying to teach any normal academic curriculum is absurd at the moment."' Another describes teaching in a large Chicago upper-grade center/high school complex: "There's not a damn thing you can do except try to stay alive when you walk into that classroom. You do that by being tough as nails and hoping no one calls your bluff. ... I'm just giving you my philosophy on teaching in the ghetto. Take it or leave it."2 The classrooms described in these two examples are sadly common in inner-city schools, and no one seems to know quite what to do about them.

Most Americans don't know it yet, but a broad new program and new objectives for the education of their children have been undertaken by the Office of Education (USOE) of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. "Career Education" as a national goal has been announced with all the promises, idealism, and enthusiasms which are the inevitable sparkling overture to new educational productions. Sidney P. Marland, assistant secretary of HEW, calls Career Education "the major objective of the USOE at this moment in time and will remain so for the foreseeable future."

THEORY and practice in the secondary school are placing a constantly increasing emphasis on living experiences of youth as contrasted with formalized informations and skills. This emphasis makes it necessary to determine the areas of living in which fall the main current and future problems of our young people. The changing social scene during the past two decades indicates at virtually every turn that economic intelligence has been, and will long continue to be, a vital problem to all members of our American social order. The high school, therefore, no longer has justification for limiting its economic training to a portion of the young people and for organizing the training solely on a "production" basis. The material must be made available to all and must include the consumer's

Christopher Jencks has written a stimulating report on the massive data analysis he and his Harvard colleagues have been engaged in since 1966, when the Coleman Report came out.' He says: (1) "Equality of opportunity" is an ill-conceived diversion from the true egalitarian goal of sharing wealth more fairly. (2) Differences among schools are not responsible for differences in adult success; reducing the differences among schools with respect to class size, per pupil expenditure, proportion of white children, or any other variable will not do much toward reducing inequities in the eventual income, prestige, or satisfaction of the adults those schools produce. (3) Both the set of decisions about how to provide schools and the set of decisions about how to reduce inequalities in family income present urgent social issues; in both cases devising solutions is a great deal easier than the task of convincing people, politically, that they want solutions. (4) Most important, the decisions about schools cannot and should not be made in the hope of solving any of society's other problems. These arguments are sensible. Like all useful conclusions they are consistent with the data but go beyond it. Jencks writes beautifully and persuasively, and the book should be read by everyone concerned with policies for education and manpower. Some early reviewers of this book (even before its publication) attacked its author for his willingness to generalize from limited data, for his political bias, and for the unacceptability of his conclusions. These particular criticisms are unjustified. In addition to writing clearly, Jencks writes responsibly. If his conclusions are misleadingly excerpted and summarized in the press it is despite his persistent efforts to make his position clear, to qualify his generalizations, and to escape misinterpretation. His political bias is stated explicitly throughout the book: he wants to bulldoze the left tail of the income distribution curve so that each family earns at least half the national average. He has some utopian ideas about this as well as some empirical observations; contrary to the fears of

At the twenty-fifth annual convention of the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Middle States and Maryland, held at Columbia University in December of I9II, Professor Julius Sachs gave a little anthology of errors made by pupils in translating from German into English. From these errors he drew the conclusion that a false standard of modern-language teaching had been set for the secondary schools by the colleges through their entrance examinations and that the attacks of all reformers ought to be made in that direction. He had nothing to say about poor teachers and poor teaching. Now, although I admire Professor Sachs, I do not agree with him. Nor do I agree with those who contend that poor results are due chiefly to lack of pedagogical training, an opinion voiced in the I912 proceedings of the same association by Dean Russell and combated by Principal Sullivan. The latter speaker said: "I think there are more teachers who make a poor showing at teaching because of lack of scholarship than there are who make a poor showing from lack of pedagogical training." In an article in the Educational Review, October, I912, I gave two causes for the poor results in modern-language teaching in our schools: the scholastic (and pedagogic) preparation of the teachers on the one hand, and the character of our pupils on the other. I shall not enlarge here upon what I said there about the average American pupil and the general character of American secondary education, with its emphasis on anything and everything except on the mastery of the subjects studied. The point that concerns me here is that this secondary instruction, continued along the same lines in college, throws back into the schools teachers of French and German who, in general, are lacking in the first requisite for good teaching, namely, adequate knowledge of subject-matter. 98

ment, of self-government in schools. Every school ought to be self-governing in the high sense that all its members are allegiant to the ideal which the school expresses. There must also be organization to bring this about, but it should be organization consonant to the nature of the school, and not forced upon it from something excellent without. The school should be an ideal community in which all are free, in which all co-operate, in which all recognize the excellent as their leader, in whose organization all have their equal share, and in which all the machinery of government has vanished in a genuine and solid unanimity of purpose.

The recent article by Mr. William H. Allen, in the School Review, has shown the need for more adequate information respecting the results of educational policy. Mr. Allen finds explanation of the tardy development of educational statistics in the fact that national reports have not reduced school data to comparable bases, that the advocates of comparative statistics fail to relate their demands to personal and local needs, and that teachers have not connected adequate statistics with the proper discharge of their own duties. In considering any subject pertaining to education, one turns naturally to the work of the National Educational Association, which for forty-seven years has watched and commented upon the trend of educational process in this country. The annual reports of this association form a history of our enlarged school system. Here we find discussion of all important steps in the development of American schools, and hither we have turned for information as to the importance ascribed to school facts by educators. After reading all articles bearing on statistics from 1858 to 1905, the following digest has been prepared: In the index volume published in 1897 we find mention of statistical articles in the following years:' 1859, 1860, 1872, 1874, 1877, 1881, 1885, 1886, 1887, 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892, and 1895. Articles have since appeared in 1897, 1899, and 1900. At the second meeting (1859) a committee of three was appointed to confer with the secretary of the interior "to ascertain what additional statistics in relation to the subject of education are desirable and feasible to obtain by means of the approaching national census." In the report submitted a year later this committee suggested the desirability of statistical information as to modes of constructing schoolhouses and methods of organizing schools. A list of important items for school reports included: (i) cost of buildings and the num

In the general development of educational opportunities in this country the night high schools have played a very interesting r6le. Yet, in comparison with other schools, they have had little space devoted to their aims and achievements. In view of this fact and because of the importance of the subject, the writer submitted the following questionnaire to the students of the West Night High School. The school is held in the Hughes High School building, is located in one of the best suburbs of the city, and is representative of a very good class of young people. Of the 6io papers submitted, 481 were answered in full or in part. The matter of replying was, of course, purely voluntary.

This seems to be the situation with respect to informal work experiences which have no direct connection with a formally organized program of cooperative work experience. Yet a few secondary schools have come to recognize the values of such informal experiences in the pattern of learning of every high-school boy and girl and have made positive plans and followed aggressive courses of action for the inclusion of these experiences in the pattern which they offer. Typical of these schools is Appalachian High School at Boone, North Carolina. Work experience is the experience which students have when they engage in any activity that results in the production of goods or services and which represents a task that needs to be done. With respect to the absence of the "made work" or "artificially contrived activity" aspect of this experience, we should recognize that the informal work experience results in production of goods or services which are actually needed quite as much as does formally organized work experi

The philosophy of the school is the philosophy of the school library. School-library practices must be in accord with the nature and characteristics of the school population, community, curriculum, administrative and teaching personnel. Some techniques and ideas can be effective only in a particular school, but many probably can be used effectively in any school. The writer will describe the program of the high-school library of the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. This library is a study center, a materials and service agency, a co-ordinating agency for the curriculum, and a curricular and social-guidance center. Library materials include trade books, textbooks, paperback books, periodicals, pamphlets, and college catalogues. Audio-visual materials are serviced and financed jointly with the Department of Education and are made available through a Laboratory School audio-visual aids co-ordinator. Since the library is the study center of the school, all students in the high school, Pre-Freshman through Senior years (twelve to seventeen years of age), are scheduled to the library for one class period or more each day. The Pre-Freshman year combines the commonly known seventhand eighth-grade programs in one year. Five hundred students are enrolled in the school, and ninety, the full accommodation of the room, are scheduled to the library per class period. Thus all students are exposed to the library for a period of

When Mr. Senger's article "A Comparison of the First-Year Courses in Latin and German" (May number of the School Review) was brought to my attention, my first thought was: "Well, no one but a teacher of the classics would have tried to make such a comparison, for only a teacher of Latin or Greek would hold to the opinion that learning a language is learning a certain number of facts." The modern teacher of modern languages realizes that teaching a language is not synonymous with drilling a certain number of facts into a pupil's head, although that is a well-defined part of the process. I presume there is some justice in Mr. Senger's comparison, but one will have to bear in mind throughout that oral work plays a much greater part in modern-language instruction than in the Latin or Greek class. We may compare the grammar work done in the German class with the grammar work of the Latin class, but we must at the same time be fully conscious of the fact that, whereas the instruction in grammar and the reading and translation of a text constitute the entire work of a Latin class, in a German class these are regarded merely as the foundation on which is to be built up a feeling for German and the ability to use simple German in the classroom in preparation for a fuller and more extended actual practical use of German in the following years. Another fact to be borne in mind when one is reading the conclusions reached in the article is that one cannot conclude that more facts are actually learned in one language than in another even though there be more to be learned. In fact, if we consider the mentality of the pupil as a constant, it would stand to reason that the pupil learns as much in one five-hour course as in another, presupposing the teachers of equal power and skill, as we shall have to do in such a general case; or we might say, the greater the amount

In matters scholastic the sole guide and inspiration has been tradition. Like the Chinese wall which barred from entry the civilizing influences of modern times, the tradition of conventional methods in education has generally frowned upon new thought and plans not based upon precedents. It is our purpose to break an opening in this Chinese wall of educational traditions by forcing through it humane, common-sense innovations on a vital matterhome study. Has it ever occurred to the teacher that he deals with living material souls ? If so, then let them be treated as something more than material which must perhaps, figuratively speaking, be molded and handled to suit the artificial conditions of traditional origin and present convenience. It is, as a matter of course, easier to move along beaten paths than to make new roads which in the end may prove more advantageous. Unfortunately many of us are not ready for new doctrines when we find that they mean more work for the teacher. If the creed, the schools are for the boys and girls and not for the teachers, except in so far as the teachers are there for the pupils, be accepted, you will have at least one basis for the statements and experience herewith presented. What a school is, does not require definition. The teacher is the important factor of the school. The modern teacher has too often, per force of tradition and method, become a mere automatic recitation-receiving device and a machine lesson-assigning apparatus. This implies that lessons are assigned to school attendants. Less than 50 per cent of the pupils, as teachers well know, do the unreasonable amount of home study required of them; the other 50 per cent "kill time" at school. Just bear this in mind, however. The municipality, the state, and the United States have established eight hours as the legal day for manual workers. I do not think it right or even humane that we educators should work young 526

For many students, school appears to be concerned only with the received wisdom of the past, a focus they find epitomized by social studies. They question whether school studies of history prepare them to deal with present problems and charge that commitment to such studies derives primarily from educators' inertia. These students call for replacing studies of the past with examination of contemporary social and political problems. Absence or inadequate treatment of these issues in the curriculum is taken as evidence of

The purpose of this investigation was to determine through experimentation the relative value of the lecture and the questionand-answer methods of class instruction in the teaching of the social sciences. In order to secure concrete data on this problem it was decided to prepare a series of lessons on some topics with which the pupils were not familiar, teach this material by the two methods under consideration, and then test the results. The subject-matter selected for these lessons was the government of England and the government of Switzerland. These governments were chosen for two reasons: first, pupils in the junior and senior high school as a rule have never made a systematic study of either of these governments and, second, these governments are so different in form and organization that very little that was learned as a result of a study of one government would carry over into the study of the other government. Each class tested was divided according to the rank method. While no attempt is made to justify this method of dividing a class, the experiment was conducted in such a manner that any variable which occurred as a result of this method of division was taken care