The Years before College

Participants in the past decade's discussions about precollegiate education speak informally of "waves" of educational reform. The first wave which took place in the early and middle 1980s, centered on attempts to ensure that students would secure the prerequisites for higher learning; this phase was often termed a quest for "basic skills" or the "basic literacies/' though sometimes commentators spoke more bluntly about "getting the little buggers to work harder." The second wave, which occupied the late 1980s, called for the professionalization of teachers and of building administrators. There should be a higher caliber of teachers, teachers should have more control over the events in their classrooms, and management should occur, as much as possible, directly on site. Commentators like Albert Shanker and Patricia Graham have pointed out that neither of these waves was controversial. No one could question the importance of basic skills, though the means by which they were attained, and the time by which they should be in place, merited discussion. By the same token, while some may have feared the negative consequences of too much teacher or building autonomy, it was scarcely correct politically to oppose this trend in too direct a fashion. One area of potential discussion has remained conspicuously absent from the first decade of discussions. This missing wave could be termed "the primary purpose of education." Various goals were implicit in many discussions, of course; they ranged from the preparation of a skilled workforce to the education of a wise citizenry. But there was understandable reluctance to make this discussion overt, because educators' goals are too likely to conflict with one another: the reformer who values well-roundedness or individual excellence might well clash with the reformer who values the graduate steeped in science or in the classics of Western civilization. Since reformers have needed all of the support and as much consensus as they could garner, it is not surprising that such discussions have taken place far more frequently in the corridors at meetings or in writings by individuals like Allan Bloom or E. D. Hirsch,1 who did not come from the ranks of precollegiate educators.