North by a major effort to serve better the children of
poverty-stricken Americans. Many educators heralded the promise of
the new electronic media, including a new president of Yale,
Kingman Brewster, Jr., who devoted a major portion of his inaugural
remarks, in 1963, to instructional technology. Significantly, both
schools and colleges dedicated themselves with vigor to enrolling
and serving more effectively America's neglected minorities,
particularly blacks and Spanish-speaking students. The number of
Ph.D.s awarded grew from 9,829 in 1959 to 29,872 in 1969, and the
budgets of most major universities tripled or quadrupled over the
same period. About the only group of institutions to experience
decline and frustration in the 1960s were the predominantly black
colleges, and since they had been in fiscal and educational trouble
right along, few people worried unduly about them.
Overarching Influences
Along with
all the astonishing events in American education over those few
short years, at least two major outside developments influenced our
educational institutions as well as the rest of American society.
The Vietnam war has had a special impact on the younger generation,
and their reaction has in turn awakened both controversy and change
in the colleges and universities. The war-rooted disaffection of
the student generation has in various ways contributed to the
troubles of higher education as well as to its reform. While some
student pressures brought on a new search for important values at
colleges and universities, there is little doubt that some of the
events that occurred in the process sapped public confidence in
higher education and contributed to its present depression.
The other
external phenomenon with major implications for education is, of
course, the rising frustration of minority groups. Blacks, Puerto
Ricans, Mexican Americans, and American Indians in the 1960s saw
for the first time some light at the end of the long, dark tunnel
into which their lives were segregated. Quite understandably, they
wanted to stand in the light sooner than the society at large was
prepared to let them. So they turned to new and more aggressive
activities and to seeking and using political power for their own
purposes. Some younger minority activists, especially, turned to
new forms of separatism based on group identity and group pride.
All these moves reverberated in educational institutions that were
beginning to enroll substantially larger numbers of articulate
young minority-group students than before, with results analogous
to those coming from war-induced pressures on higher education.
Disenchantment with our schools in the 1970s
grows paradoxically from the glowing promises of progress that
arose from the infusion of new Federal funds in the previous
decade. Late in the 1960s and in the last two years Americans
discovered the hard truth that there is no easy way, even with
large additional funds from Washington, to guarantee success in
school for the children of poverty. Whatever the handicaps of such
youngsters are, they are not overcome by the same teacher doing
more of the same things that made the child a school failure in the
first place, or even by special preschool programs designed to
provide a head start. Nor are they overcome by fancy audiovisual
equipment and a variety of other new services. To serve all
children adequately, the schools themselves must change
fundamentally—in what they teach and in the way teachers do
their work. Perhaps a million or more teachers need retraining to
enable them to work effectively with central city ghetto children,
to attune their teaching to children who spend more time before the
TV set than they do in school, and to add to their repertoire of
teaching skills the most recent insights from psychology. The
prospect of loading school budgets with heavy new in-service
training costs is not welcome news to taxpayers, who have become
even less friendly to the schools as high school students