...Schools in the United States were once a means for the cult to make sure that its common memory, certain basic skills for the exercise of citizenship, and a tribal appreciation for its principles of social life were passed on to the next generation. Thus, the culture was preserved, more or less, and very gradually the schools themselves (including the buildings) became symbols and containers of that culture. Just as county courthouses had by the 1830s come to represent Temples of the Republic, the Constitution and the Rule of Law having been adopted fully into the civil religion, by the end of World War II the government schools were established as the Academy of Democracy....
By 1945 or so, as the imperial responsibilities of the republic were thrust upon a victorious nation, the opportunities created by the greatest prosperity known by any people in all of human history made it possible for Americans to imagine fulfilling the progressive dreams of democracy and equality, guided largely by science and technology—and the schools....the following remarkable changes, presented here as historical realities and not on the basis of their merits or lack thereof.
- The transfer of initiative in American education from the culture to politics.
- The gradual transfer of educational authority from local and state to national; and from private (families, churches, voluntary associations) to public.
- The vast expansion of the educational enterprise to reach all citizens (and in many cases, non-citizens) and to embrace social engineering projects based on progressive ideals of equality and democracy.
- The complete reorganization of educational infrastructure to accomplish the new and expanded educational goals, including but not limited to the creation of a teaching profession and educational bureaucracy, the adoption of corporate and other collective (such as unions) models of organization, and the emergence of an educational architecture that is both symbol of and obstacle to the new infrastructure.
This last point might serve as a transition from history lesson to policy issue. Educational institutions have moved from cloister to campus. Literally, the spaces set aside for educational purposes have morphed from small, intimate, and often quaint places like monasteries and simple one-room buildings to campus-fields, large enclosures like industrial parks, or mysterious monsters such as the Apple “campus,” disconnected in many ways from the families, churches, villages and voluntary associations that created them....
...Consider the following (without placing blame even on committed progressive ideologues), as objective realities that do not require statistics to know that they are true.
- Families no longer have much to say about discipline, curriculum, hiring practices, standards of dress and behavior, or, in some cases, drugs that may be administered and “counseling” services that are provided to their children. In large part, this has to do with the fact that functioning families are in the minority in many areas of the country.
- Churches and religion (and therefore the moral education they usually try to provide) are almost entirely banned from schools, except in private schools that refuse government money—a tiny number.
- Almost all schools built since the 1960s have been positioned without regard to the proximity of residential neighborhoods or their potential for integration into the normal functioning of community life. Except for sports, there is little connection between school and community. This is often related to the reality of urban and suburban sprawl, and to the astonishing mobility of the American population.
- Those who conduct education, teachers and administrators especially, but in many cases those who provide maintenance and transportation, have gradually become employees whose training, standards of professional conduct, and loyalties (the people and rules to which they are responsible) reside not in the schools but in universities, unions, government bureaucracies, and private corporations.
- The ruling elites who have effected most of these changes have been overwhelmingly of a progressive cast of mind that favors change, social engineering, secularization, efficiency and diversity above all traditional communal arrangements.
The result is educational cultural chaos that will take much time and patience to correct.
...The good news is that school security is not so great a national crisis as to require a national “School Safety Czar” of national legislation to prove that our “War for Safety” is serious. We are still free enough to use existing laws and institutions to experiment in states and local communities, in government and private schools, to see what works
The History Room
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Originally Posted by MMC
