How much have the schools changed our way of life? I won't even ask how well have the schools created an informed citizenry, that which Thomas Jefferson thought should be their primary mission. What has ever happened that would make us say, why this has come about because of the schools? I can't think of anything, except perhaps the achievement gap and dropping out. Schools are just there. We're all familiar with them, but unlike parks, police, and fire engines there is no general agreement as to just what good they accomplish by being there. Rather than life changing instruments, schools are our means of occupying our chldren once it has been pointed out and agreed upon that child labor is no longer to be tolerated.
Need I even say that the real big changes in our lives are brought about, not by schools, but by new technologies? For example, the movement off the farm. "By 1940, as highly mechanized, highly capitalized farming took over, the dusty dirt roads, farm wagons and Model-T Fords passing by, threshers in overalls pitching bundles, small family farms with cows, pigs and chickens, all the speed and power of a rural way of life set by the three-mile-an-hour gait of the horse, all this was just a nostalgic memory. And since 1940 the number of Americans who farm has dropped from about 30 percent to less than three percent of the working population. This is probably the most fundamental change in modern American history, and its cultural consequences have still to be calculated." (See, Science and the Villager: The Last Sleeper Wakes, Foreign Affairs, Fall, 1982)
