During the mid-nineteenth century, Americans created the functional equivalent of earlier state religious establishments. Supported by mandatory taxation, purportedly inclusive, and vested with messianic promise, public schooling, like the earlier established churches, was touted as a bulwark of the Republic and as an essential agent of moral and…

Criticizes the ideas of the "great tradition" article (EA 519 521, this issue), pointing out that there is little historical agreement on the nature of morality, and that advocating mindless conformity to externally imposed standards of conduct is to caricature the moral life. (MD)

The literature in the area of cultural diversity in art is reviewed, and suggestions are made for an interface art program. "Interface" is described as a good blend of Anglo-conformity (total annihilation of a culture other than White Anglo Saxon Protestant) and separatism (loss of cultural identity) in art education. (KC)

Published in 1949, chapter 1 of a book by the Stelton Modern School's coprincipal discusses the natural self-directed development of creativity and intellect in children. This process is thwarted and wasted by conventional schooling's emphasis on conformity, discipline, and uniform structured activities that have no relevance to the individual…

Despite the success of Japan's educational system in terms of academic achievement, a closer examination reveals a rigid system that discourages student expression and creativity, stresses conformity, ignores differences in student abilities, and supports an intensively competitive entrance system for high school and college. Discusses negative…

This article traces the demise of creativity in the national curriculum in England and Wales. It is argued that the creative dimension in the national curriculum has been purged by various government directives since the Ruskin speech in 1976, all aiming to introduce provisions of standardisation, centralisation, and vocationalisation of…

National concerns in education and their implications for one local district are the focus of these remarks by a superintendent to his returning staff as he begins his fifth year in the Eugene, Oregon school district. Among the topics addressed are popular attitudes toward education, the achievements of the American educational system through the…

The need to involve the whole American society in education is stressed in this monograph. Education in the United States has a history of constantly attempting to accommodate the circumstances and demands of the New World. Although American education owes much to the Old World systems in areas of curriculum and stages of education, it exhibited…

Two analogies illustrate differences in educational philosophy: the child as clay to be molded by teachers to conform to predetermined standards, and the child as a flower, tended by the teacher so that it may blossom in its own way. Case studies of delinquent children have shown that some children are able draw upon inner resources and…

Scholar Ivan Illich discusses his educational experiences, the people who influenced his views regarding education, his proposal for "deschooling" society, and how he has concluded that compulsory schooling is a form of social control that creates a class society with many more school failures and dropouts than successes. (LP)

Public schooling fails by educating students to become dependent thinkers; by providing irrelevant curricula; and by weakening social institutions such as family, community, and religion. On the other hand, public libraries give students the freedom to choose what they want to read, encourage critical thinking, and be nonjudgmental of students.…

The four issues of "Skole" published in 1995 include articles examining alternatives to public education and the value of free schools. Free schools offer an unstructured curriculum in which comparisons between students are eliminated and students are empowered to be responsible for their learning. Proponents of this approach to…