Reform of Public Schools

Report Outline
Search for New Modes of Mass Education
Major Trends in Educational Innovation
Outlook for Effective School Reforms
Special Focus

Search for New Modes of Mass Education

Rising Pressure on Public Schools to Change

Pressure on the nation's public schools to reform is mounting as their troubles increase. The traditionally slow-to-change school systems are being asked not merely to graft on innovative programs here and there but to adopt totally new approaches to the task of educating the nation's young people. The demand for fundamental change comes at a lime when many schools are almost overwhelmed by shortages of funds, student rebellions, militant teacher unionism and desegregation problems. The troubles of the schools are, in fact, spurring on reform.

The pressure for change comes from all sides—from education theorists, blue-ribbon study commissions, the makers of instructional materials, author-critics, disillusioned schoolteachers, parents and students. The last, especially, demand “relevancy” and “humanity” in the daily school life as campus unrest penetrates the high school. A marked weakening of confidence in the efficacy of traditional school practices has obviously taken hold of educator and layman alike.

Though some schools are moving toward a new order of what some would call a revolution in education, the massive public school system as a whole can hardly be said to have made an appreciable shift from the instructional modes of the past, “The average American school,” Emmanuel G. Mestheme wrote, “is disquietingly like the schools we went to 30 years ago. Peace, quiet, and order are prominent among its objectives, he said, and the typical teacher still sticks to a pre-established lesson plan regardless of pupil interest. But quietude is no guarantee that all is well. The Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Robert H. Finch, has warned: “The passive acquiescence of boredom is just as much an index of trouble in schools as vandalism and disruption, even though one receives the headlines and the other does not.” Both disruption and boredom, he said, show “how little we do know about success or failures of our American educational system.