Every participant in the century-long educational debate has agreed that the true function of schooling in America ought to be the development of individual talents and abilities, in order to contribute to the well-being of both the individual and the society

The Right Schools: 

Ideological Debate on the History of Education

by Richard Jensen

American society has long idealized education as the ultimate panacea for every social ill and as the engine of economic progress. Today, however, Americans are abandoning their faith in education. Conservatives, as reflected by the Reagan-Stockman budget and the Proposition 13 movement, are trying to cut back on school spending at all levels; liberals have used court-ordered busing and affirmative-action programs to impose unpopular reforms; radicals are condemning the school system as the hopelessly corrupt integral core of a hopelessly corrupt capitalist system.

Within the educational system, morale has fallen to an all-time low.

Teachers battle administrators and school boards through unionization and strikes. 

Students have reverted to their own counterculture, in which drugs, alcohol, rock music, and sex play a more central role than homework, classwork, or learning. 

In a time of doubt, confusion, and conflict, historians are called upon to explain how such an educational system developed—what its original purposes and achievements were, and how the schools contribute to, or hinder, the attainment of social goals. 

In the last decade historians have risen to the challenge; fierce debate has been raging over the role of the school in American history over the last century.

At the deepest level, every participant in the century-long educational debate has agreed that the true function of schooling in America ought to be the development of individual talents and abilities, in order to contribute to the well-being of both the individual and the society. 

The traits to be released are three: cognitive ability, moral character, and ambition. Ideals of education that perpetuate established castes, or, for that matter, the systematic suppression of formerly powerful classes (like the Chinese gentry), have always been denounced in this country by all parties, though radicals insist that the suppression of potentially radical classes has been the hidden purpose of the educational system.

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