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Rx for Sick Schools
| Article
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20398 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1992 |
3,390 Words |
| Author
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John Bremer
John Bremer, a Cambridge philosopher and educator, writes
mostly on Plato. |
S.O.S.
Sustain Our Schools
Patricia Albjerg Graham
New York: Hill and Wang, 1991
195 pp., $ 22.95 cloth
LIBERATING SCHOOLS
Education in the Inner City
David Boaz, ed.
Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1991
220 pp., $ 25.95 cloth, $ 13.95 paper
SAVAGE INEQUALITIES
Children in America's Schools
Jonathan Kozol
New York: Crown Publishers, 1991
288 pp., $ 20.00
If H.G. Wells was correct when he said that human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe, then we should prepare our survival shelters. The race is almost lost, and with it the human race.
And yet, at the same time, there is, especially in America, a hopefulness that we can still do something that something can still be done. But what should be done, and how it can get done, and who can do it are questions that we cannot answer. Consequently, our view of the race between education and catastrophe varies alarmingly. At one time, we think, catastrophe is so far in front that its victory and our down full is a dead certainly; but suddenly, we imagine that education can overcome, can overtake the catastrophes, and a peaceful, harmonious and happy life will be open to us and to our neighbors. If only we knew who our neighbors are and we do not.
The parlous state of our educational programs and institutions throughout the fifty states is generally acknowledged and usually lamented, but it does not seem that we are as aware of the Wellsian threat to ourselves, our families, and our way of life. Nor are we aware of how we came to the current conditions, or who or what is responsible, and how it can be changed for the better. One thing seems clear to me, and that is that we have lost sight of our morality, and of education as an essentially moral enterprise. It has been easy to think of it as purely, or at least primarily, intellectual. When we should have been insisting, increasingly with social and technological change, that the prime
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