| Summary: | "It is rather the fashion of the day to describe conditions in our educational system as chaotic. To people who recall the orderliness and comfortable assurance of an earlier day, present conditions may well seem chaotic. There are few things under the sun, however, for which there is no reasonable explanation. The phenomena which are before us are seemingly to be explained as the consequences of unheeded changes in American society, which have been taking place during about a generation past, and of structural maladaptations in the school system which did not become apparent until an increasing load and increasing discontent brought them to light. It is quite true that in education, as indeed in all the technologies which deal with organic life, there tends always to be a lunatic fringe of the fantastic and merely adventurous. This tendency in public schools is greatly exaggerated by the obsolete political organization of the school system and by our well-nigh incurable amateurism and left-over romanticism. A tradition which commits the government of our national enterprise in public instruction to 150,000 different school boards could hardly do otherwise than hamper sound progress in adaptation to social requirements in general, and especially to economic conditions. Further, when any quack who is endowed with a glib tongue and a happy exemption from the trammels of information and logic can gain the ear of people who are, after all, influential in determining schoolroom practices, chaotic conditions are naturally to be expected. However, these are but the surface movements. On the other hand, a process of readjustment has now for some time been going on. This rather fundamental change or series of changes is exemplified: first, by modifications of structure as seen in the development of the junior high school and junior college and in reorganization at university level; and, second, by changes in general method in the field of pedagogy. Both these sets of changes constitute a reversion to type, the type which in the early part of our national period represented the normal and natural adaptation of the school system to the underlying social and political conceptions of the American Commonwealth. The changes in school organization have been forced by social changes. Changes in pedagogy are being brought by the application of scientific method to the study of the learning processes. In a state in which there is no strong ministry of education to study, guide, and control, such changes inevitably result in confusion, for they constitute the supreme opportunity of the innovator who is merely restless"--Book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).
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