A school administrator emailed me recently asking if I could track down an article from a 1966 issue of Independent School. As it turns out, I could. Fortuitously, in scanning the article, I noticed another piece titled "The Distinctive Character of Independent Schools," by James Wheeler, then chair of the Department of Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education at Rutgers University. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see what a professor of education at a public university in the pivotal decade of the 1960s had to say about independent schools.
Wheeler wasn’t effusive in his praise of independent schools. In fact, while acknowledging that formal education in this nation started with private schools, he believed the shift to a predominantly public system was putting increasing pressure on independent schools to justify their existence in society. Still, while he spoke highly of public education, he also noted some of the then-recent trends that gave him pause — and that anticipated the main concerns about public education that have surfaced Godzilla-like in our No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top eras. As Wheeler put it, the "educational perspective coming into fashion in the public schools is excessively mechanical, excessively methodological, and excessively narrow — one more concerned with results than long-range goals. Consequently, the educational significance of the play of one mind on another, teacher to pupil, pupil to pupil, is at a discount."
The language may border on anachronistic, but it has some heft to it — and is certainly prescient. Wheeler, feeling that public education was in danger "of losing its humanity," concluded: "I can think of no more creditable thing that could be said of the independent school as relates to its distinctive character than to say that it has preserved and fostered not merely a humane education, but the humane in education."
It strikes me that the lead articles in this issue — imagining the future school 20 years hence and how we get there — are descendants of Wheeler’s view. There are so many things we can’t know about the future of schools, and might be foolish to announce with any certainty. Sure, technology will transform schools to some degree. Globalization — made possible by technology and made necessary by shared problems — will require us to know each other and collaborate across national boundaries. Global warming, the loss of biodiversity, and other environmental issues will reshape how we live and what we do. Beyond this, I mostly have a wish for schools. Education is a mediated experience — and, one way or another, I hope that we will mediate well. In all schools, public and private, I hope we’ll work hard to keep "the humane in education" our primary goal.
Do this and the future will always feel bright.
Michael Brosnan
Editor