Acceptance of African AMericans in america
...ratification, albeit surreptitiously. How else can we make sense of the gross inequities described in Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities (Crown, 1991)? What other explanation can we find for Benjamin Barber's view that Americans don't really care about education? See his essay "America Skips School: Why We Talk So Much About Education And Do So Little" (Harper's Magazine, November, 1993). Twenty years ago, when I was working on an advanced degree, there were several researchers and theorists writing on what they saw as the real functions of education. Weighted down with data, these books never rose to the surface of public attention. Most sank completely out of sight in the agitated waters of the Reagan administration's A Nation at Risk report. But I remember them, those warning voices lost in the storm of debate over how to improve education. Some were sociologists. Others were educational historians, but of a different breed than many from that specialty. They liked to dig around in the dusty old records of schools and school districts and look at the facts. They wanted to know how education functioned, not how some theorist wanted it to function. Look at Michael Katz's Class, Bureaucracy and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (Praeger, 1971). Learn how, from the very beginning of public education in this country, the purpose was to maintain the social order. Scan Colin Greer's The Great School Legend (Basic Books, 1972). Greer looks into schools' failure to assimilate immigrants early in this century, and dispels the myth that schools can ameliorate the conditions of the lower classes. Or, review the oh-so-politically-incorrect Schooling in Capitalist America (Basic Books, 1976) by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Bowles and Gintis expose the meritocratic myths of education and elucidate the connection between education and the structures of economic life. And finally, on a somewhat different note, there is Robert Dreeben's little book On What is Learned in School (Addison-Wesley, 1968). Dreeben examines the hidden curriculum of our present form of traditional public schooling and its role in developing norms useful in fostering modern bureaucratic society. None of these works are easy reading because they tell an ugly story, one we really don't want to hear. That story is that education isn't the means by which individuals from any strata of society are empowered to improve their life chances. Instead, they are mostly kept from moving out of the strata into which they were born by a system that operates according to rules that favor the advantaged. As a third-generation teacher, whose family business has been education since Grandma started teaching in 1906, I hate this story. I don't want to acknowledge this skeleton in the education closet. In the twenty years since I learned of it I have found some satisfaction working in alternative schools, and with alternatives to traditional teaching, small ways to uplift the downtrodden. But the skeleton is still there, unacknowledged by, and apparently invisible to, most of the other employees in my family business. A key question to try to answer is, ...