EDUCATION POLICY - WHAT EVERY CITIZEN SHOULD KNOW
PURPOSE OF THIS PRIMER: Today, an objective look at America’s situation, and at global trends, strongly suggests that the strengths and weaknesses of American education are critical to our future. This civic primer is a condensed analysis of American education from early childhood through high school, its problems, and options for improvement. The primer’s purpose is to help develop public understanding in support of better education.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: See the Outline on the title page.
READING TIME: No more than necessary, in the light of the following quotation.
“One of the most important aspects of the way of life of any society, primitive or advanced, is their child-rearing practices”.
- Ralph Linton, President of the American Anthropological Association, head of the United States School of Military Government in World War II, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, Sterling Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, and author of “The Study of Man”.
EDUCATION POLICY - WHAT EVERY CITIZEN SHOULD KNOW
OUTLINE:
Overview
THE BASICS (Parts 1 through 5)
1. What are the three components of education and what are its five goals?
2. What are the main elements of quality in education?
3. What six kinds of curricular subjects should students learn?
4. Who educates (parents, teachers, peers, and media)?
5. Who controls education (administrators, politicians, others)?
THE PROBLEMS (Parts 6 through 9)
6. What are the greatest obstacles to quality in education?
7. What are the best ways to improve the quality of education?
8. What are the major issues in education policy?
9. How can parents and other citizens improve education?
Appendices:
A. Suggested Contents of History and Civics Curriculum
B. Curriculum Elements for the Life Skills (health management and money management.)
C. Suggestions for Further Reading and Web sites.
D. Selected Education Organizations.
E. About CQC and the Participants in Developing this Primer.
F. Public Schools in other Modern Industrialized Countries.
G. Suggestions about Parenting Education.
OVERVIEW View Primer
This primer is designed for parents and other citizens who are concerned about the quality of education in America. The future of our children depends in large part on their education. And the future of America, in a turbulent world, also depends in large part on the quality and financing of American education.
The ongoing and accelerating development of technology in most fields – medicine, warfare, computers, economic production, communications – offers all of us a higher material standard of living, but at the price of a world of daunting complexity.
To cope effectively with the many choices and problems of today and tomorrow, and for society to identify and manage successfully the benefits and risks in major areas of policy and subcultures, individuals will require a very high quality of education.
Lacking high quality education, society may be increasingly dominated by the few, and these few may have inadequate competence and values. Their leadership will thus be questionable, yet the rest of society will be poorly equipped to question them. History suggests that a contributing cause for the decline and collapse of some empires and nations may have been the weakness of their education systems, compounded by the incompetence of their leaders. More recent examples are the incompetence of both leaders and citizens in the great Western democracies in the 1920s and 1930s which led to the Great Depression and World War II.
American education today has many important strengths. These include many excellent, dedicated teachers, administrators, librarians, and support staff; a greater range of educational choices for most than in many other nations; a sufficiency of actual or potential resources for better education; and democratic traditions and procedures that give parents, other citizens, and the media a high degree of open access to the policies and operations of educational organizations.
But along with these strengths are weaknesses that demand attention. Both the strengths and the weaknesses depend on many factors. These factors vary from system to system, from school to school, and even from classroom to classroom.
Recently, public and private advocates have stressed the need to improve our weak science and math education, in order to remain economically competitive with foreign nations. We agree on this need, but we believe that three other weaknesses are equally, if not more, important: weaknesses in developing early childhood readiness for school, weakness in literacy, and weakness in preparing students for civic responsibility.
In a democracy, citizens and parents have the ultimate responsibility for public policies, including the scope and quality of education and the schools’ civic mission. At the same time education, as actually conducted in this country, is a very complex process, which needs the best efforts of professional educators and of researchers on education. As a practical matter, progress in education depends on cooperation among all the concerned groups.
This primer is intended to help in the exercise of civic responsibility for education. It is not a scholarly thesis, dissertation, or research report. Its practical value can perhaps be judged by its contents, and by the appendix which describes the nine persons who drafted it and the many and varied outside experts whose comments on the draft were taken into account before publication, a process which took over three years.