Continuity and Change in the Pursuit of a Democratic Public Mission for Our Schools

An essential mission of schools, Mr. Bellamy and Mr. Goodlad argue, is ensuring that each new generation understands the principles and institutions that support democratic life. Schools require vigilant stewardship to serve this public purpose. Much of the needed work is local, but it depends on new and challenging collaborations among education professionals, local public groups, and policy makers. THE EARLY immigrant landowners in what is now New England taxed themselves to provide schools for the less-fortunate newcomers, most of whom they employed. Why? For their own children, the landowners were able to provide tutors, support private academies, or make arrangements to have them schooled in the homelands they had left behind. Were they simply compassionate people? Records show a public purpose--that of "civilizing" these children of newcomers in schools charged with teaching the laws of the landand supplementing the church in instilling certain moral principles and behaviors. Presumably, a strong motivation was the inevitability of living with everyone's children. The people of that era saw no need to consider the religious beliefs and moral principles of other churches and cultures. That reality had not yet begun to complicate the work of schooling. Nor had today's global complexities of human diversity made their appearance when the Founders met to forge the legal and moral framework of the American democracy. Nor did the Founders seek to define a public purpose for the schools of this democracy. Schooling as such wasnot on their agenda. But something more comprehensive and complex was: the delineation of the freedoms and responsibilities of a democratic public. There was, however, in the separate writing of several leaders at the time, the clear assumption that a democratic public is a well-educated public--but not necessarily a much-schooled one. As philosopher Jane Roland Martin makes clear, people become educated not merely by attending school but by the total experience of their lives. (1) As part of this experience, "we the people" must endeavor to ensure a nonnegotiable mission for our schools that cultivates democratic belief and action in the young. No other agency in our culture is capable of or charged with this challenging agenda. A CHALLENGING DEMOCRATIC MISSION Democracies are premised on the idea that human differences can be accommodated, even great differences in fundamental beliefs. This end is accomplished through mutual tolerance, commitment to resolving disagreements by means of open dialogue, and acquiescence to majority decision making within constitutional protections for individual and minority rights. Education has special responsibilities in democratic societies because all the decisions underlying public institutions are subject to ongoing review. Each new majority can amend the constitution, change the laws, shift public funding to new priorities, undo checks and balances, and allow values of liberty and tolerance to wane. Education is essential, then, to give each generation an understanding of the principles and institutions that support a democratic society. A four-part mission for schools in a democracy responds to this need for continuing renewal of the social and institutional underpinnings of democratic life: 1) providing equal access to high-quality, school-based learning for the young; 2) promoting responsible stewardship of schools and universities; 3) improving teaching and learning through pedagogy that nurtures and challenges all learners; and 4) providing students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to become fully engaged participants in a democratic society. Schooling requires vigilant stewardship if these critical missions are to be accomplished, because educational institutions face the prospect of constant remaking as policy makers, interest groups, and education professionals act separately to determine what our schools are to do. …