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PARTISAN REVIEW
speak about the responsibility of politics and the obligation of societies for
school systems.
Comparing school systems is no less difficult than comparing societies.
Every international comparison of education and school organization is
faced with an almost insoluble problem that we know from the compar–
isons of parliamentary, political, and party systems . Educational
organizations are part of a much more complicated overall social system.
They cannot be truly understood without looking at the whole social,
political system, at the value system of a society, at the distribution of
power within a society, the "haves and the have-nots." No educational sys–
tem can be discussed without the question of whether (and to what
extent) equality or inequality and the realization of equal opportunities is
predominant or not. John Dewey, probably the most important pedagogi–
cal thinker of the first half of our century, once expressed it this way:
"Education is life, and school is society."
Austria is a small country in Europe and compared to the United
States only a dot on the globe. But, almost without exception, all of our
guests from the United States are envious of our school system, mostly for
the following reasons: first, the almost total lack of criminality, the almost
total lack of drug and drug-related (violent) crimes. Another reason is the
exemplary treatment of private schools in Austria. The private schools in
my country have all teachers' salaries paid by the government (and despite
that, the enrollment statistics in Vienna's private schools show a decreasing
number of pupils mostly because public schools seem to be more attractive
amongst parents) . We also have an internationally renowned school build–
ing architecture. Moreover, the national state guarantees that every teacher
will be paid the same amount (not differing from one local authority to
another) and that teachers will be better paid than most other civil servants.
And we have a relatively lean school management with educators and for–
mer active teachers in almost every key position.
In the eyes of many of our visitors, Austria is a blessed land, an island
of bliss, at least as far as the schools are concerned. But as an observer for
over twenty years I have to say I am fascinated by the pedagogic discus–
sions in the United States. The contradictions within the American school
system are highly interesting for any innocent from abroad. In my visits to
American schools I have met mostly extremely committed teachers. But I
understand that some of those teachers also feel that they are working
under unfair conditions-extreme inequalities. To me, the twenty minutes
from Stuyvesant High School to Seward Park High School in Manhattan
are not merely a pleasant walk-they are a journey from the developed
world deep into the heart of darkness, into the Third World, into differ–
ences that are hard to understand from a European point of view.
