213. Who
Controls American Education? : The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Who
Controls American Education?
James
Koerner was a well-known national figure in the 1960s when he headed a presidential commission looking into the
causes of civil unrest after Detroit's black riots. A former president of the Council for Basic
Education, he had more than enough
information and experience to write a public guide for laymen in which
the players, policies, and processes of
the system are laid bare.
His book Who Controls American Education?
was published in 1968. The area even
Koerner, with his gilt-edged resume and contacts, hesitated to tread
hard
in was that region of philosophy, history, principles, and goals which might uncover the belief system that really drives mass schooling. While noting accurately the "missionary zeal" of those who sell ideas in the educational marketplace and deploring what he termed the "hideous coinages" of political palaver like "key influentials," "change agents," and "demand articulators," and while even noting that experts at the Educational Testing Service "tell us that schools should seek to build a new social order and that they, the experts, know what the new order should be," Koerner carefully avoided that sensitive zone of ultimate motives — except to caution laymen to "regard with great skepticism the solutions to educational problems that may be offered with great certitude by experts."
in was that region of philosophy, history, principles, and goals which might uncover the belief system that really drives mass schooling. While noting accurately the "missionary zeal" of those who sell ideas in the educational marketplace and deploring what he termed the "hideous coinages" of political palaver like "key influentials," "change agents," and "demand articulators," and while even noting that experts at the Educational Testing Service "tell us that schools should seek to build a new social order and that they, the experts, know what the new order should be," Koerner carefully avoided that sensitive zone of ultimate motives — except to caution laymen to "regard with great skepticism the solutions to educational problems that may be offered with great certitude by experts."
"It is not at all clear,"
continued the cautious Mr. Koerner, "that fundamental decisions are better made by people with postgraduate
degrees than by those with undergraduate
degrees, or with no degrees at all." Toward the end of his book,
Koerner defined the upper echelons of
school policy as "progressive, modern, life-adjustment" folk,
but ducked away from explaining how
people with these attitudes gained the driver's seat in a democracy from a body politic which largely
rejects those perspectives.
Nor
did he explain what keeps them there in the face of withering criticism.
Koerner was impressed, however, with
what he called "the staying power of the ancien regime" and challenged his readers to resign themselves
to a long wait before they might expect the
modern school establishment "to give all students a sound basic
education":
Anyone who thinks there [will be] a new
establishment in charge of the vast industry of
training and licensing teachers and administrators in this country has
his head in the sand.
What we miss in Koerner's otherwise excellent
manual on school politics is any
speculation about its purpose. We are left to assume that a misguided
affection for the underclasses — an
excess of democracy, perhaps — caused this mess. That conclusion would be dead wrong. Such a madcap course
could not have been pursued so long and
hard without a clear purpose giving coherence to the melee, if only for
the simple reason it costs so much. What
Jaime Escalante, whose teaching career was commemorated in the film"Stand and Deliver" and Marva
Collins (see her book, Marva Collins Way) — and a host of teachers like them — understand is
that almost anyone can learn almost anything if
a few fundamental preconditions are met, not expensive to arrange. Such
teachers explode the myth of the bell
curve — without ever intending to be revolutionaries, they are.
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