Showing papers on "Compulsory education published in 1977"

Politics and Educational Reform

Abstract: THE LAST CENTURY AND A HALF HAVE SEEN EDUCATION in Europe and North America change from a cottage industry into a gigantic, highly bureaucratized enterprise. The reasons for this are several. For one thing, the growth of capital-intensive industry meant a greater need for workers with such basic skills as reading, writing, and arithmetic. National leaders, who saw industrialization as one key to national power, also realized the need for men who could handle the increasingly complicated technologies and tactics of warfare. The enfranchisement of ever more people led to popular parties anxious to enhance their power base further by creating a literate and politically sophisticated electorate. All these and still other pressures increased the demand for more education covering a broader range of topics, a demand whose fulfillment was made easier by the growing wealth of national states. The burgeoning of education brought its own problems with it. The most obvious of these, of course, was the transformation through state controls of traditional educational processes. The notion that parents were primarily responsible for the education of their children diminished as the state introduced compulsory education and as the requirements of life in highly industrialized settings left parents ever less capable of equipping their children with the skills and concepts they needed. State-imposed curricular requirements, certification of teachers, inspectorates, and the like removed the schools still further from the parents. Such procedures had their advantages, to be sure, such as ensuring that children throughout a country had a reasonably similar education. The accompanying routinization nonetheless made it more difficult to tailor educational offerings to the needs and capabilities of each individual child.

From Universalism to Usurpation: An Essay on the Antecedents to Compulsory School Attendance Legislation

Abstract: Compulsory education is receiving increasing attention in policy making, educational, and scholarly circles. The Yoder case, which established the right of the Amish in Wisconsin not to send their children to school beyond the eighth grade, tested compulsion in the policy arena via the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. In finding for Yoder, however, the court majority noted more than three centuries of self-sufficiency and adherence to the principles of law and order by the Amish, and cautioned that the court's decision should not be construed as opening the door to a flood of petitions against compulsory education per se. This action by the Supreme Court appeared to discourage questioning the propriety of compulsion itself, especially by groups, as Justice Burger put it, \"claiming to have recently discovered some progressive or more enlightened process for rearing children in modern life.\" Yet the dimensions of compulsory education itself are not the direct provision of the Supreme Court, as education in general is under state rather than federal jurisdiction. Here too, compulsion is receiving wider publicity. Recently, a Florida judge ruled that the father of five young children was not required to send