CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Schools in 1990

THE BIGGEST IN FRASTRUCTURE CHALLENGE for this country in the next decade is not the billions needed for railroads, highways, and energy. It is the American school system, from kindergarten through the Ph.D. program and the postgraduate education of adults. And it requires something far scarcer than money—thinking and risk-taking.

The challenge is not one of expansion. On the contrary, the explosive growth in enrollment over the last thirty years has come to an end. By 1978 more than 93 percent of young people entering the labor force had at least an eighth-grade education. So even if the birth rate should rise somewhat, little expansion is possible for elementary, junior high, and high school enrollments.

Graduate and professional schools are still flush with the last age cohorts of the “baby boom” years. But by 1985 these students will have been succeeded by the leaner age groups of the “baby bust” that began in 1960. Some contraction in enrollments is definitely in store.

The last thirty years of social upheaval in the schools are also over. Busing will continue to be a highly emotional issue in a good many metropolitan areas. And there will still be efforts to use schools to bring women into fields such as engineering that have traditionally been considered male. But this shift has already been accomplished in many fields: Half or more of the accounting students in graduate schools of business, for example, are now women. As for most other social issues, the country will no longer try to use schools to bring about social reform and reconstruction. It’s becoming increasingly clear to policy-makers that schools cannot solve all the problems of the larger community.

Instead, the battle cry for the eighties and nineties will be the demand for performance and accountability. For thirty years employers have been hiring graduates for their degrees rather than their capabilities; employment, pay, and often even promotion have depended on one’s diploma. Now many major employers are beginning to demand more than the completion of school. Some of the major banks, for example, are studying the possibility of entrance examinations that would test the knowledge and abilities of graduates applying for jobs as management trainees.

Students and parents, too, will demand greater accountability from schools on all levels. Indeed, with teaching jobs remaining scarce, the customers of education—parents, students, school boards—will have the upper hand no matter how militantly teachers unionize. It will be increasingly common to bring lawsuits against school districts and colleges for awarding degrees without imparting the skills that presumably go along with them. And many young people are already switching to practical “hard” subjects. Paying no heed to the incantations of youth culture and the media, they have been shifting from psychology into medicine, from sociology into accounting, and from black studies into computer programing.

Demand for education is actually going up, not down. What is going down, and fairly fast, is demand for traditional education in traditional schools.

Indeed, the fastest-growing industry in America today may be the continuing professional education of highly schooled mid-career adults. Much of it takes place outside the education establishment—through companies, hospitals, and government bureaus that run courses for managerial and professional employees; or through management associations and trade associations. Meanwhile, any number of private entrepreneurs are organizing seminars and courses, producing training films and audio tapes and otherwise taking advantage of growth opportunities that university faculties shy away from.

The demand for continuing education does not take the form that most observers, including this writer, originally expected—namely, “Great Books” classes for adults wanting to learn about the humanities, the arts, the “life of the mind.” We face instead an all but insatiable demand for advanced professional education: in engineering and medicine, in accounting and journalism, in law and in administration and management.

Yet the mature adults who come back for such studies also demand what teachers of professional subjects are so rarely able to supply: a humanistic perspective that can integrate advanced professional and technical knowledge into a broader universe of experience and learning. Since these new students also need unconventional hours—evenings, weekends, or high-intensity courses that cram a semester’s work into two weeks—their demands for learning pose a vague but real threat to academia. Academia’s standard response—producing new Ph.D.s for a new department—is roughly comparable to restyling the buggy whip for leadership in the new market for horseless carriages.

The greatest challenge to educators is likely to come from our new opportunities for diversity. We now have the chance to apply the basic findings of psychological development and educational research over the last hundred years: namely, that no one educational method fits all children.

Almost all youngsters—and apparently oldsters as well—are capable of attaining the same standards within a reasonable period of time. All but a few babies, for instance, learn to walk by the age of two and to talk by the age of three. But no two get there quite the same way, as parents have known for eons.

So too at higher levels. Some children learn best by rote, in structured environments with high certainty and strict discipline. Others thrive in the less-structured permissive atmosphere of a progressive school. Some adults learn out of books, some learn by doing, some learn best by listening. Some students need prescribed daily doses of information; others need challenge, the “broad picture,” and a high degree of responsibility for the design of their own work. But for too long, educators have insisted that there is one best way to teach and learn, even though they have disagreed about what the way is.

A century ago, the great majority of Americans lived in communities so small that only one one-room schoolhouse was within walking distance of small children. Then there had to be one right method for everybody to learn.

Today the great majority of schoolchildren in the United States (and all developed countries) live in metropolitan areas with such density that there can easily be three or four elementary schools—as well as junior highs and even high schools—within each child’s walking or bicycling distance. There will therefore be increasing demand for some kind of “voucher” system enabling students and their parents to choose between alternative routes to learning offered by competing schools.

Indeed, competition and choice are already beginning to infiltrate the school system. Fundamentalist and evangelical schools and colleges have shown an amazing ability to prosper during a period of rising costs and dropping enrollments elsewhere. All this is anathema, of course, to the public school establishment. But economics, student needs, and our new understanding of how people learn are bound to break the traditional education monopoly just as trucks and airplanes broke the monopoly of the railroads, and computers and “chips” are breaking the telephone monopoly.

In the next ten or fifteen years we will almost certainly see strong pressures to make schools responsible for thinking through what kind of learning methods are appropriate for each child. We will almost certainly see tremendous pressure, from parents and students alike, for result-focused education and for accountability in meeting objectives set for individual students. The continuing professional education of highly educated mid-career adults will become a third tier in addition to undergraduate and professional or graduate work. Above all, attention will shift back to schools and education as the central capital investment and infrastructure of a “knowledge society.”

(1981)