Why Public Schools? Whose Public Schools?: What Early Communities Have to Tell Us

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Are the public schools the public's schools? And if they need to be, what is the public? Public schools today often mean little other than schools paid for by tax revenue. If that is all they are, they may mean far less in the future than they have in the past. Communities built the first schools and, in turn, the common work of establishing them "built" the communities. Yet we seldom take that into account now when we try to improve our schools. The people who supported the cause of education made the effort because it was their cause. And it was their cause because the schools were their schools. Champions of public education had to deal with articulate critics who argued that common schooling wasn't a requirement for democracy because nothing could be more absurd than encouraging "people to read and judge for themselves." Giving everyone as much schooling as they wanted was thought equally absurd; it would be better to determine children's probable destiny and educate them accordingly. And putting youngsters from different social economic backgrounds in the same classroom, according to critics, would never be accepted. Public education was said to be born of an idealism that was as impractical as it was undesirable. Book jacket.