16 December 2008
At School
This article is excerpted from the IIP Publication Sketchbook USA, a richly illustrated volume that depicts Americans at work, at play, in their communities, and engaging in civic life. View and download the fully formatted Sketchbook.
If it’s a typical school day in the United States, journalist Nicholas Lemann has observed, about one-quarter of the American population — counting students, teachers, and staff — are sitting somewhere in a public school building or in a college classroom. Students can be confronting the mysteries of middle-school algebra, secondary school juniors writing essays in Spanish, or a college biochemistry class writing up the results of a laboratory experiment.
In the 19th century, the United States was the first nation to establish universal free public education as a national goal. It is fair to say that education in all its aspects has remained a central preoccupation of American society ever since.
The great dramas of U.S. social history have played out in the schools: westward expansion, immigration, race relations, industrial growth, and the evolving role of women. The United States has defined its values and purpose as a free democratic nation in its schools.
Despite obvious similarities with classrooms around the world, the U.S. school system has evolved in some distinctive ways, among them, size, diversity, decentralization, and choice.
With its commitment to universal free education, the United States maintains one of the largest educational enterprises in the world. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 76 million children and adults are enrolled in American schools from nursery school to college — another 6.8 million are teachers.
Today, there are more than 95,700 elementary and secondary schools in the United States, plus more than 4,000 colleges and universities.
Although the overwhelming majority of Americans attend public schools, more than 11 percent of the 55 million elementary and secondary students are enrolled in private schools. More than half of the nation’s 5 million private school students attend Catholic schools, the nation’s oldest private school system. Other private schools are a window on America’s religious diversity, encompassing virtually all major Protestant denominations, as well as the Quaker, Islamic, Jewish, and Greek Orthodox faiths.
The mix of private and public schools is even more pronounced at the college level, where students can attend local two-year institutions, often called community colleges; compete for places at smaller, private liberal arts colleges; or apply to large state universities with multiple campuses, which may enroll 30,000 to 50,000 students.
The ethnic, racial, and social changes in America’s schools have mirrored the social and political changes in the country as a whole. Although the United States adopted the goal of universal free education early in its history, slavery and segregation excluded African Americans from equal education until the mid-20th century. Other minority groups, including Hispanics and Native Americans, suffered from discrimination during this same period.
Issues related to educational opportunity persist, but American schools today are more diverse than ever before: 41 percent of all public school students are from minority ethnic groups.
Although Spanish-speaking students constitute the largest foreign-language group, many public schools in large metropolitan areas are a veritable United Nations of diversity. Vietnamese, Chinese, Hindi, Persian, Arabic, and Russian are the first languages of many youngsters in U.S. public schools. It is not surprising, then, that English as a Second Language has become one of the teaching profession’s fastest-growing specialties.
At the college level, the most dramatic change in recent decades concerns gender. Of the 18 million students now attending institutions of higher learning, about 56 percent of undergraduates and a remarkable 59 percent of graduate students are women.
U.S. education is characterized by a level of decentralized control almost unknown elsewhere. The federal government does not directly oversee education, the states do. The United States may have national standards, but not a national curriculum. Federal influence in education has unquestionably grown over the years, but public education, from school buses to school textbooks, remains the responsibility of states and local communities.
One element of local control today has been an increasing emphasis on choice, not simply between public and private schools, but options regarding the kind of teaching that takes place inside them. Most families send their children to their neighborhood schools. But in many urban communities, they can apply to foreign-language schools, schools that emphasize a “back-to-basics” curriculum, or a “magnet” school providing advanced instruction in, for example, science or the arts.
Another alternative is charter schools: public schools that operate independently of the local school system, giving them more flexibility in course offerings and providing an element of competition to regular public schools.
Despite diversity and decentralization, American schools have been consistent in teaching the nation’s core beliefs in democracy, individual freedom, and religious tolerance. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one of public education’s great triumphs was its ability to educate vast numbers of immigrants from Europe. Schoolchildren didn’t just learn English and arithmetic, they learned how to become Americans. In later decades, schools had to meet the demands for equal opportunity by African Americans and other minorities, a task that continues today.
As scholar Diane Ravitch has written: “To me, the most radical of all American ideas is the idea that everyone can be educated — not just that everyone can go to school, but that everyone can be educated.”
All education transmits values and beliefs. The purpose of education in a democracy such as the United States, however, is not to indoctrinate students but to provide them with the knowledge and ability to seek their own path in an environment of open inquiry and respect for others.
The debate over the purpose and content of education in the United States is a necessary and continuing one. As scholar David Tyack writes: “I do not see any way to achieve a good future for our children more effectively than debating together and working together on how we educate the next generation. Children may be about 20 percent of the population, but they are 100 percent of the future.”
