|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Saturn: A School of the Future
| Article
# : |
19703 |
|
|
Section : |
LIFE
|
| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
2,308 Words |
| Author
: |
John Bremer
John Bremer, a Cambridge philosopher and educator, writes
mostly on Plato. |
We're talking about breaking the mold--building for the next American century. Reinventing--literally starting from the bottom up to build revolutionary new schools, not with bricks and mortar but with questions and ideas and determination. We're looking at every possible way to make schools better while still keeping our eyes on the results.
So said President Bush at the signing of his AMERICA 2000 Excellence in Education Act. He had traveled to St. Paul, Minnesota, to send this legislation to Congress from the Saturn School of Tomorrow--the kind of "break the mold" school called for in his proposal. He wanted to see the school for himself and draw the country's attention to an example of what can be done.
Source of Inspiration
The Saturn School of Tomorrow was not named after the Roman god nor after the planet, "the bringer of old age," but after the new age General Motors Saturn plant.
The design of the school began in 1986 when Tom King, a St. Paul educational administrator and former math teacher, proposed to Superintendent of Schools David Bennett that it was time to do what the Saturn plant had done, namely, to rethink the design of the enterprise.
The GM Saturn plant had changed not only its way of making automobiles, but also the social organization behind it. Manufacturing was revolutionized by technology, social organization by site-based management, which breaks down the traditional labor-management separation and invests authority for decision making locally. Could not the same be done for schools?
New production plants signal that the social organization of the nineteenth-century factory is obsolete. In it human power is obsolete. In it human power had become frustrated and wasted in needless antagonisms and jealous guardings of the division of work tasks. The nineteenth-century factory was a marvel of production in its day, however, and when the burgeoning democracies of Europe and America faced the social problem of educating everybody--something never before attempted--politicians and educators turned to it as a model for the public school system.
Students were essentially regarded as raw material to be shaped in accordance with a design, the written and unwritten curriculum, by the activities of the operative, the teacher,
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
