ARGUMENTS
WHY JOHNNY CAN'T
It would be almost comforting to believe that the failures of
American education were the result of failures of imagination and were
to be cured by a rich application of imagination to its ills. And this
volume suggests something of what imagination, free from bureaucratic
limitations and traditional assumptions, might do.
1
But it also describes,
by implication, a system of education so hardened into bureaucracy
and tradition that, for a large proportion of its students, it serves more
as a penal system than as a way to learning. The imagination needed
for important change is manifest here, but the power to let it loose is
not. Imagination means risk and some obvious waste; it constitutes a
threat to the way things are and to the people who keep them that
way. And there is little evidence that it will be tolerated. American
education is simply too big to take chances.
The seriousness of the problems is only now becoming clear to
many people outside that cluster of radical critics, like Paul Goodman
and Edgar Friedenberg, who have been reminding us for years that
things are not as they should be and that the restructuring of American
education must be radical. Until very recent years, most of us- who
have been dissatisfied with American education have confined our com–
plaints to cocktail parties, to expressions of contempt for colleges of
education, to occasional confrontations with simpleminded teachers or
with rigidly unintelligent bureaucrats administering rigidly unintelligent
curricula and jargon devised "experiments."
It
has taken clear and bitter manifestations of the social implica–
tions of our entire educational system to make us aware that we have
been quietly complicit
in
what amounts to a conspiracy against our
children. The message has leaked up to us slowly. A decade ago, critics
were directing much of their energy to ending the hypocritical and
vicious "separate but equal" system in the South; Sputnik helped us
Radical School Reform.
Ed.
by
Ronald and Beatrice Gross. Simon
&Ild
Schuster. $7.95.
