Moving Forward by Looking Behind

 “When will America make up its mind about what public education should be, and what will American schools and society look like in the next 50 years?  

These are questions that I asked earlier this semester when reflecting on a video that we watched in my "Schools and Society" class.  We recently finished the series and after seeing the whole series I think I can safely speculate that in the near future the American school system will begin looking to the past to move forward, and they will allow more parental choice and control in the education of America’s youth.

The main thing that we will begin to notice with our public education is that the school districts that want to move forward will begin to look to the past for curriculum and guidance.  When the school system began, it was primarily designed and started to teach the three R’s; reading, writing, and arithmetic.  It was focused to raise educated Americans.  There was a focus on patriotism and morality, in addition to the core knowledge areas. 

Then, beginning in the early 1900’s, reformers like John Dewey came out and redesigned the system to be more student oriented and friendly.  The Progressive School was formed to allow learning through social interaction.  Students, in the progressive method, learned best through real-world experience and research.  The classroom moved away from the teacher centered lecture and allowed more hands-on experimentation with the world around us.  Jump ahead to the present and we see a new movement on the rise that I feel incorporates both methods into an interesting and successful program: the "Core Knowledge" method. 

I find the "Core Knowledge" method interesting because it still stresses academic excellence in the cores of reading, writing and math, yet is progressive in its applications and research.  They still stress the basics, but also realize and allow students to own part of their education through hands on research and experimentation.   

Secondly, the schools of the future are going to allow more parental choice and involvement in the education of their child.  Starting in the mid-1980’s after “A Nation at Risk” was issued during the Reagan administration, there was a surge of school choice experiments and legislations.  The goal of school choice at the time was to raise academic excellence by allowing parents to choose schools that best suited the needs of their children.  It also allowed for business to invest in schooling.  They hoped that by bringing business resources and completion into the schools, then the things that makes American business great, would in turn make American education great.  The rise of Magnet schools that specialized in certain fields, vouchers that allowed parents to send their students to a school of choice, and finally the homeschool movement of the 1990’s show that parents are aware,  involved, and invested in the education of their children. 

If the American school systems, and politicians for that matter, wish to remain relevant, and quite frankly employed, they need to begin to reform and redesign the existing public school to meet these expectations.  The story of the American school system is a story of constant change.  We have the advantage of looking back over the course of the last 100 years and can identify the things that have worked, and not worked.  More importantly, we can identify what people want. 

We live in a society where everything is governed by supply and demand.  The American parents in general feel that there is still some improvement that needs to be done in the education of their students.  I think what we will see in the near future are school boards and administrators that will begin to give the people, the parents, what they want and in turn we will see American students unlock their full potential as Americans.