21st CENTURY NEEDS NEW SCHOOL MODEL
Letter to the Editor by Gisele Huff
Education Week, May 15, 2002 

To the Editor:

In his Commentary "The Continuing Imperative for Educational Equity" (April 24, 2002), Michael A. Rebell characterizes the rise of common schools in the late 19th century as a battle between the good guys and the bad guys and ties the requirements of democracy to an educated citizenry. But some of the "good guys" were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who looked with distaste and apprehension at the waves of immigrant "others" who were predominantly Roman Catholic. It is those crusaders who put the education of the public in the hands of the state and specifically excluded parochial schools from funding. It is worth noting that, although the common schools they established were nonsectarian, they were not nonreligious. In many states, prayers and Bible readings were part of the curriculum until 1963, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws permitting them.

Common schools then were seen by their proponents as the great unifiers, the protectors of the nation's dominant values, and the producers of obedient, compliant workers for the Industrial Revolution. That is the way public schools were structured -- top-down, industrial-era-management style. And that is the way they remain to this day; hence, the seemingly insoluble problems of trying to reform the system to fit into the 21st century and meet the demands it makes on our children.

In this context, the equalitarian dynamic that Michael A. Rebell describes as inexorable is a 20th-century anachronism that has no place at the beginning of the 21st century. We are just beginning to understand how the brain actually works and how differently children learn. We are finding scientific evidence and beginning to develop corresponding methodologies to accommodate these differences. Far from reinforcing the quest for equality beyond that established by classical liberalism -- that all men are created equal before God and before the law -- science is taking us down a path that recognizes how different people are.

How can our public schools, created in the 19th century for an entirely different purpose, make sure that no child is left behind? They can't as they are currently configured: monopolistic bureaucracies requiring an act of courage to overcome the rigidities they impose.

What, then, is the solution? To take the government out of the equation except for the funding; to attach the funding to the individual child; to let parents choose the best schools for their children according to the kind of learners they are; to let teachers teach where and how their talents are most prized; and to allow as many delivery systems as there is demand for.

When Oregonians approved an initiative requiring virtually all children to attend public schools, thereby sounding the death knell for all other forms of education, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1925 decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, found the law to be unconstitutional. The court asserted that "the fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right coupled with the high duty to recognize and prepare him for higher obligations."

 -- Gisèle Huff 
San Francisco, Calif.

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