Radio Commentary
The early leaders of our
country created publicly funded schools to educate children from ALL walks of
life. It’s hard to remember it was a radical idea at the time.
Our founders recognized the
importance of education to the well-being of the country. They were seeking to
achieve more than just teaching children reading, writing, and math.
They
believed that a system of publicly supported schools ought to achieve several
major goals:
• prepare
people to become responsible citizens
• improve social conditions
• promote cultural unity
• help people become economically
self-sufficient
• enhance individual happiness and enrich
individual lives
• dispel inequities in education
• ensure a basic quality level among schools
These goals were worthy of
our great democracy. Then and now, meeting the goals can only be measured over
time, when we can see how students have applied their schooling.
We hear critics of public
schools call for alternatives that shift funding and responsibility for
education to the private sector.
When we
weigh these suggestions, it is important to remember the whole picture of what
we seek from public education.
We need to consider whether the
alternatives better meet the loftier goals our founders had in mind when public
education was first conceived. Those higher goals should always be our focus.
