Issue: Saturday, July 15, 1995 - page 5

The smell of wet mittens on the radiator and rubber cement mixed with color construction paper have faded from all memory of education in America—it's now concealed and corrupted under a stench with no known origin and no foreseen end.
   In much the same way, the American consciousness fears its inventiveness and industry could have run out of gas or could have been overtaken by a more speedy and streamlined foreign contingent. If the topic of Week Four, "World Competitiveness: U.S. Education and Industry," could be reduced to the cry of a children's fable, the question is not whether the "sky is falling," but whether the sky already collapsed. In a week of lectures and porch discussions, Chautauquans face this task: the attempt to assess the ceiling of American enterprise and ideals.
   Maybe the sky isn't falling. Maybe the pleas and hysterics form a healthy, archetypal questioning that resurfaces every half century.
   According to renown anthropologist Margaret Mead in a lecture at Harvard University on March 15, 1950, the conflict is natural.    "If we turn from images to look formally at the history of American education, of its theory and its practice, the conflict between the school oriented toward the past (private/parochial) and the school oriented toward the future (city/public), with the seldom obtainable dream of a (rural) school which would hold the world steady, will be found to be a prevailing theme," Mead said. "This theme is expressed in many forms: in the struggle between classics and modern languages; in the struggle between 'at least one foreign language' and none at all."
   Her observations still resonate today.
   The dream according to Mead is the red brick schoolhouse set out in the country with a one-room class taught by a young female teacher. She pointed out that though this "dream" school was getting harder to find in America, it was deeply rooted in the lore of this country and the American dream. The remarkable part of Mead's analysis is that the threefold picture of American education continues to exist, except the red brick schoolhouse has been replaced with a "Leave it to Beaver" vision of the ordered "good upbringing."
   The sky may not be falling on industry, either. Possibly, the global village has been poorly defined as a problem for U.S. industry.
   "I don't see international competitiveness as a sort of Olympics with the U.S. competing against Japan, Britain and Korea and all these countries, and then we have to come out first in all the contests," said Sheldon Richman, senior editor at the Cato Institute and recent lecturer on arts and social change at Chautauqua.
   "That is not how the marketplace works. It is individuals worldwide cooperating and competing, that is what the economic process is. If I buy something from Sony, I have a harmony of interest with Sony. It is not America versus Japan."
   Maybe the sky is falling, but it's OK, it's an inevitable change. Our perceptions and fears might not be caught up with the current reality of social upheaval. In "The Age of Social Transformation," published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1994, author Peter F. Drucker asserts the emergence of the "knowledge society" as the reason for the decline in American manufacturing employment.
   Figures from the U.S. Department of Labor, compiled by the World Almanac from 1992 research, project that professional specialty occupations willl increase by 37.4 percent, service occupations by 33.4 percent and executive occupations by 25.8 percent before the year 2005. These are exactly the "knowledge workers" that Drucker addressed in his article. By contrast, operators, fabricators and laborers will increase only 9.5 percent.
   According to Drucker, "There is no lower or higher knowledge." Every knowledge worker has a field of expertise, which some acquire through heavy study (his example is brain surgery) as opposed to lesser study (his example is podiatry).
   "Education will become the center of the knowledge society, and the school its key institution," Drucker said. "What knowledge must everybody have? What is quality in learning and teaching? These will of necessity become the central concerns of the knowledge society, and central political issues."

   But Drucker does not endorse the changes to a knowledge society without a note of caution.
   "There are obvious dangers to this. For instance, society could easily degenerate into emphasizing formal degrees rather than performance capacity.... On the other hand, it could overvalue immediately usable, 'practical' knowledge and underrate the importance of fundamentals, and of wisdom altogether," Drucker said. Maybe the sky has already collapsed and must be rebuilt or regenerated through an entire new outlook or approach. If this holds true, then an alternative must be found. But education is far from being without alternatives or options.
   In 1907, Dr. Maria Montessori, an Italian psychiatrist, opened her first casa dei bambini to children of the slums in Rome. She began teaching her own method, the Montessori Method, which would be endorsed by the Dutch government in 1922. In Holland she would open a system of Montessori schools from preschool through high school.
The method allows the child to choose what he or she wishes to learn from the learning tools provided. Education becomes self-acquired through the use of at least one or more of the five senses and easily sustained by the child working with what he or she likes. Montessori questioned the university in fulfilling its role in an essay titled, "The Functions of the University."
   "Usually the student enters the university after his eighteenth year and remains there some two or three years after being of age. The university therefore can be said to be really a school for adults," Montessori said.
   "This purely physiological consideration concerning its students places the university in a position that is different from that of all other schools. In its constitution, however, the university shows no marked change from other schools, it is but their continuation. The student continues to follow lessons, to listen to professors, to take examinations, and, as formerly, the success of his studies depends upon the marks he receives. The only difference is that university students are not strictly held to say lessons or do homework, whereas they have been accustomed to forced work under continuous control. This means that, as at the university this control is lifted, the students often tudy less often," Montessori said. The essay formed the third section of appendices to her collection of lectures titled "From Childhood to Adolescence," published in 1948.
   Montessori's words may be similar to Drucker's "obvious dangers." With more and more high school graduates choosing to enter the university in the attempt to secure financial success, the university will undergo much more focused scrutiny.
   The recent distress over the public school system and the state of overall education has led to the resurgence of home schooling and the issuance of vouchers for attending private schools. But the sense of collapse in education has led to some interesting new movements and new techniques as well.