have been embarrassed by the incident—‘traumatized’ in the parlance of today—was not allowed to overshadow the importance of the lesson he learned. He even became one of my good friends and a responsible student. Today if I were to be so bold as to reprimand a student like Walter in a public school, or even in a private one, his parents would raise a storm of protest and demand I be fired for my actions. If the administration defended me, which today would rarely happen, the Matthis clan might even go to court and take legal action against me or the school.
Because of the years I have spent at the variety of institutions where I have both taught and studied, I have a keen appreciation of the educational process in America and how it has changed inrecent years. The nation has a strong tradition of education upon which to draw. As early as the 1640s the Massachusetts Bay Colony was passing laws requiring the townships to build schools and to teach reading, writing and arithmetic. Of equal importance, the colony also established the tradition of taxing the public to support the schools.
Surprisingly, even though Washington and Jefferson were among many of the founding fathers who stressed the need for general education in a democratic society, our Constitution does not mention education. In 1779 Jefferson was unsuccessful in his attempt to establish public education in Virginia, but by the 1850s the principle of local schools for the education of all children at public expense was widely accepted, at least in the northern states. In the states west of the Alleghenies our nation developed the remarkable system of national land grants for public schools. In Texas, before the fall of the Alamo and the final victory at San Jacinto, the Texas Declaration of Independence declared that ‘unless a people are educated and enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty or the capacity for self-government.’
But the person primarily responsible for the creation of a nationwide system of free public education was Horace Mann, a remarkable lawyer from Massachusetts. He was, successively, a skilled lawyer, a member of the state legislature, secretary of the state board of education, a member of the national Congress and president of Antioch College in Ohio. In his spare time he toured the nation preaching his passionate belief in free public schools, so that by the 1850s the nation as a whole had come to share his views. He was indeed the father of the American public school, which he saw as the basis of a free democracy.
America’s free public schools provided the ladder that enabled me to climb out of my obscure village into active participation ina great democracy. Today, in my sixty-sixth year of teaching, again in a fine university, I am increasingly mindful of H. G. Wells’s warning that ‘Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.’ I am more involved in education than I ever was and consider myself qualified to make the following evaluations of our schools and colleges.
First, the brightest and hardest-working students, who are the ones I see today, are better than I was at their age in the 1912–1931 period. They know more, have a wider frame of reference, do better in tests and behave admirably. The top students are an impressive lot, of whom our nation can be proud. The future welfare of our nation is in safe hands insofar as having a supply of truly bright people to help run it.
Second, the many students at the bottom of the academic pile are no worse today than those I knew in school, except that they may be limiting their opportunities further by drugs. I regret to say that they seem largely incapable of absorbing any education at all. Unfortunately the types of service jobs traditionally open to them—manual labor, menial tasks—are not increasing and the wage scales in the service sector are dropping to levels inadequate for economic survival. These
Because of the years I have spent at the variety of institutions where I have both taught and studied, I have a keen appreciation of the educational process in America and how it has changed inrecent years. The nation has a strong tradition of education upon which to draw. As early as the 1640s the Massachusetts Bay Colony was passing laws requiring the townships to build schools and to teach reading, writing and arithmetic. Of equal importance, the colony also established the tradition of taxing the public to support the schools.
Surprisingly, even though Washington and Jefferson were among many of the founding fathers who stressed the need for general education in a democratic society, our Constitution does not mention education. In 1779 Jefferson was unsuccessful in his attempt to establish public education in Virginia, but by the 1850s the principle of local schools for the education of all children at public expense was widely accepted, at least in the northern states. In the states west of the Alleghenies our nation developed the remarkable system of national land grants for public schools. In Texas, before the fall of the Alamo and the final victory at San Jacinto, the Texas Declaration of Independence declared that ‘unless a people are educated and enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty or the capacity for self-government.’
But the person primarily responsible for the creation of a nationwide system of free public education was Horace Mann, a remarkable lawyer from Massachusetts. He was, successively, a skilled lawyer, a member of the state legislature, secretary of the state board of education, a member of the national Congress and president of Antioch College in Ohio. In his spare time he toured the nation preaching his passionate belief in free public schools, so that by the 1850s the nation as a whole had come to share his views. He was indeed the father of the American public school, which he saw as the basis of a free democracy.
America’s free public schools provided the ladder that enabled me to climb out of my obscure village into active participation ina great democracy. Today, in my sixty-sixth year of teaching, again in a fine university, I am increasingly mindful of H. G. Wells’s warning that ‘Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.’ I am more involved in education than I ever was and consider myself qualified to make the following evaluations of our schools and colleges.
First, the brightest and hardest-working students, who are the ones I see today, are better than I was at their age in the 1912–1931 period. They know more, have a wider frame of reference, do better in tests and behave admirably. The top students are an impressive lot, of whom our nation can be proud. The future welfare of our nation is in safe hands insofar as having a supply of truly bright people to help run it.
Second, the many students at the bottom of the academic pile are no worse today than those I knew in school, except that they may be limiting their opportunities further by drugs. I regret to say that they seem largely incapable of absorbing any education at all. Unfortunately the types of service jobs traditionally open to them—manual labor, menial tasks—are not increasing and the wage scales in the service sector are dropping to levels inadequate for economic survival. These
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