The public school education field is awash in research, surveys, professional consulting services, new initiatives, standards, etc., all supporting the importance of education and supposedly showing the way to better SAT scores and an educated generation. But this same education system continues to bear the brunt of criticism from the public sector as a failing institution. Public education bureaucracies, teacher unions and school boards supply all the correct rhetoric and concern but exhibit only intransigence and mediocre results. In response to this apparent intransigence, alternative programs and institutions are springing up. These new programs experience some limited individual success, sometimes at the expense of public education, mostly in spite of public education and never to the long-term advantage of public education.
What will be the paradigm that will emerge to save America's public education system?
The Langberg Foundation has developed an operating formula that can make a difference:
THE NEED FOR REFORM AND REDESIGN OF OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM
It is not enough to reform our K-12 schools; what is needed is an entirely new approach to the delivery of education from pre-natal through the end of life.
We are witnessing a period of rapid change in our society: the changing proportions of the population that can be characterized as rural, urban and suburban, the changes in the distribution of wealth, the growing numbers of ethnic minorities, the changing workplace, television in all of its manifestations, the general trend of a growing divorce rate, the need for child-care, and longer life expectancy. These changes have been observed by countless leaders in our communities over the last thirty years, and yet the culture of schooling persists as if none of these changes has occurred.
To meet the needs of today's society and tomorrow's, the focus on reforming our K-12 schools must be expanded to include attention to the redesign of our entire system of education. We must continue to try to create educational environments that are conducive to the highest levels of learning that all students are capable of attaining, but schools, as we know them, are not the only such environments capable of supporting and encouraging such Learning Libraries, homes, museums, businesses and agencies also are, or should be, in the education business.
The telecommunications revolution, while not making schools obsolete, has certainly changed what they might consider to be their mission. Information dispensing cannot be the sole function of schools in an information age! It may be that, among other tasks, or perhaps as their major task, schools need to help students deal with quality control, making sense out of all the information with which they are being inundated.
In addition to whatever appropriate changes can and should be made in K-12 education, we must also address child care and early childhood education in ways that preserve, as much as possible, the integrity of families. This will require the development of a means of providing these families the help that they need to be effective educators of their children. We must also develop the will, because from this we can create the means, to assure that the quality of a child's education is independent of the economic status of her/his parent(s)!
The current university system in our country is also in need of redesign. Rather than institutions of inquiry, they have become centers of "acquiry", where the students come to obtain credentials that can be "cashed in" in our market economy. The notion of an alternative university is not new, but too many of the recent models seem more concerned with earning than learning. We want to investigate models for offering alternatives to what has been called "higher" education, and we are beginning with attention to the preparation of teachers.
One such model which the Langberg Foundation has developed and administered is Education for Moral Courage, which offers a curriculum that integrates academic pursuits with universal moral values such as caring, determination, flexibility, idealism/hope and reliability/trust. In support of this curriculum, the program also provides training for teachers and community members as ethnographers, helping them to transform the culture of their school and community to one that is congruent with the precepts being learned in the classroom. Although this program has been piloted with upper elementary students, it has the potential for application to people of any age.
The combination of a curriculum with the ethnographic study necessary to ensure that the curriculum is embedded in a school culture that is consistent with its precepts is powerful. When the third component, community, is added, this approach to education becomes universal.
