Chapter 6, What's Wrong with Our Schools? Summary and Analysis

Education is a goal for most people. Schools that were private and voluntary became public and mandatory early in the nineteen hundreds. However, the education that was once very good is now declining. Parents have little control over the kind of education their children receive when education is publicly provided. The movement from private to public education was promoted by teachers and government, not parents. This resulted in a decline in the quality of education. Most education was controlled at the local level. Since the years of the Great Depression, control has gradually shifted from local to state to federal. Government administrators may have different ideas about how to achieve educational goals than the parents do. The more centralized and bureaucratized education becomes the less control the parents have.

Those with...