LINK – 25 Years of U.S. Education: Reform Still Needed | Newsweek Education | Newsweek.com
…But the argument that public schools had to give a rigorous academic education to most students was a radical proposition. It challenged a core assumption of public education dating back to the beginning of the 20th century: that the education best suited to a majority of the nations students after they acquired basic literacy skills in the early grades was one that emphasized not intellectual training but the acquisition of skills that had practical uses on the factory floor. For decades, public educators had embraced an emphatically utilitarian vision of public secondary schooling.
Overwhelmingly, they saw public schools as sorting machines, giving different students different educations based on assumptions about their futures. Most students, they believed, should be taught primarily to use their hands to prepare them for the blue-collar jobs that they would have. (Before 1984) As a result, even students who stayed in high school long enough to earn diplomas in many cases were given the equivalent of eighth-grade educations….
