PART I -- WHERE WE STAND TODAY

CHAPTER 1 -- The Problem

The educational institutions of this country are being challenged on every side with an intensity unparalleled in history.

There have been attacks before, by isolated individuals or groups. But the schools have always enjoyed the solid support of the great masses of people whom they served.

Today, the onslaught takes place on broad fronts, and the mass support is no longer evident.

A year ago many could still say the problems are elsewhere but not here. Now only those who choose not to see are still complacent. The mood has changed from "It can't happen here" to "How soon?"

Let us look at just a few examples of danger points in the school set-up.

The central purpose of our schools is to provide students with an education. For generations, the vast majority of students were satisfied clients of the system, accepting the services performed for them, and giving in return a fair degree of effort and obedience. Most educational reforms came not as a result of student protest, but as a result of the work of devoted teachers and administrators, who sought to improve even further an already excellent product.

What a far cry from the situation today. Now, students of all ages, in all schools -- public, parochial, and private; inner-city, suburban, and country; primary, secondary, and higher -- are in a turmoil of protest and rebellion.

Students find their studies irrelevant, their teachers arbitrary, and their work excessive. Regardless of the number and kind of curriculum reforms introduced, at great expense, every year, academic performance shows no significant improvement.

At worst, students hate their schools, and vent their hatred in tens of millions of dollars of active vandalism every year. At best, they are apathetic. Walk into the finest modern school building, and you will find littered rooms, carved desks, filthy lavatories, and violated walls that we are accustomed to expect of old buildings. Examine the educational resources of most recent acquisition, and you will find torn books, theft-ridden libraries, scratched records, smashed audio-visual machines, and ravaged equipment.

Students resent -- even hate -- their teachers, not so much as people, but as wielders of arbitrary and unchallengeable authority. They hate their administrators for the absolute power these people are allowed to exercise.

They hate themselves, and engage in a breathtaking frenzy of self-destructive activity: poor work, irresponsible behavior, petty -- and later, not so pretty -- delinquency, drugs, to blow their minds and "trip out" to a never-never land of lethargy, dissociation, and insanity.

Adults try to hide from the realities, try to find reassurance in statistics, in promises, in confessions; but the truth, known to most adults and all students, is that the student world of schools at all levels has become a nightmare of resentment, hatred, and rebellion.

The mainstay of the schools has been the teachers who, in their hundreds of thousands, have been society's agents for transmitting its culture from one generation to the next. The job had in itself great rewards, greatest of which was the knowledge each teacher had of his role in serving society by training its youth. And there were other compensations -- community respect, job security, and fair, if not lavish, pay.

How far from this is the teacher's position today! He finds his clients, the students, no longer accepting his product, and he finds that he himself is dissatisfied with the material he is called upon to teach. And, when he tries to change the material, he comes face to face with the realization that he is virtually powerless to affect the contents of the curriculum he is called upon to present. Though he has been trained for years in schools of higher learning, though he has often continued his studies beyond his degree, though he is fully aware of the currents and trends sweeping the community in which he lives as a citizen, he is almost totally without say as to what he may do in his own classroom.

He finds himself given little responsibility, and rarely held to account for successes or failures. His colleagues come and go with an alarming turnover rate. His work is drab and routine. And, like so many others in the same sort of deteriorating position, he seeks salvation in ever shorter working hours, ever higher pay, ever greater material benefits -- but without changing his basic situation in the least. And he brings on himself the added onus of community resentment against the escalating demands, resulting in escalating taxes on an already overtaxed citizenry.

The traditional leadership of the educational community has been the central school administration, in all types of schools at all levels. Their plight today has become almost legendary. Not long ago, it was common to find university presidents who were serving their second or third decades in their posts; department chairmen who were hiring the children of their earliest staff members; school superintendents who had presided over the education of their replacements. Today, administrative turnover is surprisingly rapid, and replacements are ever harder to find. A top job has a life-expectancy of a few years at most, and its occupants leave as bitter and spent men.

Administrators bear the brunt of all the discontents, and add a full measure of their own resentments. Though possessors of vast domains of control, they can rarely exercise their best judgment unhampered. They are burdened with formal powers, but they have little influence on the course of events from day to day.

They are lonely people, beset by enmity and hostility.

The basic backing for the schools, public and private alike, has come from the community at large, from the citizens whose children attend the schools, and whose moneys pay for the schools.

As long as community support was forthcoming, the schools could withstand any disaffections coming from within or without. And nowhere is the plight of our schools more evident than in the area of community support.

For generations, the overwhelming majority of citizens were basically satisfied with what the schools were doing. Of course, there were often complaints, but these came from the outer fringes, from minorities, from political extremists.

Today, community support is a thing of the past. Whatever the issue, the public is ferocious in its division over the schools, and hardly a person is satisfied with what is being done: harder discipline vs. permissiveness; adult authority vs. student demands; integration vs. segregation; busing vs. community schools; sex education at school vs. sex education at home; school prayers vs. separation of church and school; escalating costs vs. holding the line; censorship vs. unfettered expression -- and the list of issues seems endless, the depth and intensity of division seems immeasurable, and the ability of schools to maintain any sort of public support seems seriously in question.

We have glanced at only a few areas in which the schools are presently engaged in a struggle for existence. There is a real question, desperately serious, as to whether our educational institutions can survive at all into the next decade.

What is noteworthy -- and this cannot be sufficiently stressed -- is the broad scope of the challenge to the schools. We are not talking about a few sniping attacks here and there. We are talking about attacks from people of all ages, in all positions relative to the school, of all political affiliations, of all economic and social strata -- all of them deeply disaffected with an educational system that is about to come apart at the seams.

The present threat to our schools is as broadly based as the support for these same schools once was.

There is a reason for the present evil, just as there was a reason for the past good.

The support of the schools in the past was based on the many successful services they rendered to the public. We will have occasion to go into more details later in the book.

The present widespread failure of our schools is due to the simple fact that they are wholly out of harmony with this country's way of life. They no longer can represent the culture that they serve.

The educational system in this country today is the most un-American institution we have in our midst. That is why it must change, root and branch, to survive and regain its support.