Staying Power
Two themes provide a clumsy counterpoint in
the current focus on public schools. The one—often claiming the
center of the political stage—asserts that schools are generally
failing academically. Even good ones aren't good enough, and the
poorest performers embarrass and even shock. The other, deep in our
culture but lost in the anguish about academic achievement, is the
belief that much of our success as a nation rests on the shared
experience of going to public school. For many young people, it is at
school—as much as (and for some more than) through family,
church, or popular culture—that their beliefs in common
principles of self-government, equality, personal achievement, and
interdependence are shaped, updated, and connected with daily
experience.
If the schools are that important, then any time they fail they betray a child's potential. But the issue of school performance is not simply between failure and success. Rather, the issue is how to combine understanding of learning, teaching, and children with the public commitment to invest in each generation what is required for its members to take effective charge of their individual and collective lives. A failure to do so puts, as has been said many times since 1983, the nation at risk. The risk is not just to the practical effectiveness of governing or the economic machinery. It is also to the vitality and sustainability of the nation's principles regarding opportunity, fairness, liberty, the rule of law, and social obligation.
The public schools not only teach about these matters, they provide a model. Schooling is an academic encounter with the great ideas that give skills meaning and the skills that give those ideas life. It is also an extended practicum in living and working together. When it succeeds, personal, economic, civic, and social capacities are established. When it falls short, it establishes instead chronic, generation-long deficits and may even imperil social...
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