Introduction to Education and Institutions

Table of Contents

• Background: Thoughts on Education
• Institutions: Levels of Government
• Some Historical Landmarks

Background & General Ideas

In the most general terms, education is a social mechanism for the transmission by one generation to the next of

• skills and information expected and intended to be of use to youth (e.g., professional skills, knowledge)
and of
• society's values, including such ideas as the individual's place in society, that is, how the individual is expected to relate to others, i.e., the nature of the individual's identity

(it will be observed that this definition of education creates potential links with religion, which also includes elements of personal identity)

Decisions and choices about what is useful and what values to transmit are made by adults, that is, by representatives or delegates of society, who have themselves been educated into society. This means that "school" is created and operated / run for the young by their elders. (This may, perhaps, be the origin of Mark Twain's admonition to "never let school interfere with your education")

In the US, education is not even decentralized, but un-centralized, because it has never been centralized. To that extent, education has further parallels with religion, which is protected, but not dictated by official policy; the parallels with religion were especially strong in the 19th and early twentieth centuries by the influence of a huge Protestant majority on the content of education: prayers, Bible readings, etc. were a commonplace in public education till the mid-twentieth century.

Institutions

Understanding public education in the US requires some knowledge of the levels of government and the distribution of various kinds of authority among the levels. In particular, the roles of the federal government, the states and local governments interact in ways that must be understood.

Federal government

The federal government was created by the Constitution, which is an agreement between the states intended to advance both the individual interests of each state and the collective interests of all the states. The Constitution assigns various powers to the central government; education is not among them, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that most education at the end of the eighteenth century was carried out either by preceptors, for the well-to-do, or by religious organizations (in the US, typically Protestant). Public education quickly became a subject of public debate, especially in the North, but remained firmly rooted in the states until the mid-twentieth century.

States

Under the Constitution, the states exercise authority in all the domains that are not explicitly assigned to the federal government, including education.

Table of areas of authority [this link leads to the first year course material on education; for institutions properly speaking, students may find the link called "structures" to be useful]

Some Landmarks of Education History

17C NEng: Puritans

18C Constitution (1787)

early 19C: Horace Mann & Common Sch mvt

19C sch ≈ extension of home (moral precepts, basic knowledge & skills)

Education Interacts with Religion

(NB Puritans above, of course)

19C RCC & Common Sch

end 19C - bgng 20C: HS ("creationism" & Scopes)

Education, Ethnicity and Race Relations

end 19C "Americanization" (New Imm ≠ WASPs)

last 1/4 of 19C - mid 20C: racial segregation

20C & 21C*: Changing interpretations

Although the Federal government has no constitutional mandate to intervene in the area of education, it has become more and more involved, especially since the middle of the twentieth century.

Religion & the "Establishment Clause"

The First Amendment prohibits the (federal) government from "establishing" any church or religion, i.e., from making any particular religion the official religion of the US. The so-called "establishment clause" has been the object of evolving interpretations by the Supreme Court for many decades.

1942 & 43 Flag Salute Cases

1962-63 Prayer in public schools prohibited

1968 creationism declared unconstitutional

1971 "Lemon" test

1987 "Creation science" unconstitutional

2000... "Intelligent design": KS, 2005 Dover, PA (Kitzmiller vs Dover Schools), CA, UT

Ethnicity & Race

1954 Brown vs Board of Education

In the 1950s, as the Civil Rights Movement began to get under way, the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 (Brown vs Board of Education) that racial segregation is unconstitutional and must therefore come to an end**.

1970s Affirmative Action

Raising Standards
Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, Congress, on the advice of the President, began to take more energetic measures to promote education in the US, largely because of outside influences.
• 1957 Sputnik
When the USSR launched the first man-made satellite into outer space, Americans were thunder-struck. Most had assumed that American technology and science were far superior to those of any other country, including the Soviet Union, but Sputnik threw doubt on that assumption. In any case, it was objectively true that science education had not been a top priority in the US: at least since the Scopes trial of 1925, for example, science textbook publishers had avoided references to Darwinian evolution for fear of jeopardizing sales in states where fundamentalism was a significant political power. After Sputnik, Congress began to encourage science education in order to catch up.
• 1965 ESEA
As part of his "Great Society" program, President Lyndon Johnson recommended that the federal government take steps to reduce inequalities in the US. One component of the measures he proposed was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provided a number of mechanisms to encourage the states to implement programs intended to improve education, especially for the urban poor. This had the effect of improving education for racial minorities, and especially African-Americans, who were (and still are) massively concentrated in inner cities.
• 1983 "A Nation at Risk"
An official report by a panel of experts claimed that if a foreign power had done to the US's educational system what the US had done, it would be regarded as an act of war: the panel held that American education was producing a semi-literate population that would be unable to compete against students and citizens from other industrialized countries in Europe and especially in Asia.
• 2002 "No Child Left Behind" Act (NCLB)
George W. Bush campaigned, among other things, on a platform of educational reform. The NCLB Act, which he signed into law in early 2002, is characteristic of his vision of the Presidency and the role of the federal government: far more interventionist in relations between federal government and the states than previous Presidents, together with a market approach to education. In order to qualify for federal funds, which all of the states need to keep their educational systems running, states must implement a variety of programs, including a system of testing to insure that students of each age-group are able to perform at required levels, on the assumption that student performance is a function of the quality of teaching the students have received. School districts and individual schools that do not meet required standards risk sanctions, including loss of funding and even outright dismissal for both teaching and administrative staff. The basic assumption is that an enterprise which fails to achieve desired results should be eliminated from the market.

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* NB: The abbreviations "20C" for twentieth century and 21C for twenty-first century, and so on, are just that, abbreviations, and while they are very useful for taking notes, are not appropriate for use in written essays and the like. [back to text].

** It will be noted that the Court thus declared unambiguously (the decision was unanimous) that racial discrimination and segregation are incompatible with the values of the US, and that they should not be taught in school, whether to Black children or to White. [back to text].