Public Education as the Embodiment of the Knowledge and Values to Be Transmitted to Youth
Education represents the knowledge
and values that a society passes on to youth. Prehistorically and
historically, peoples have told stories around campfires, practiced seasonal
rituals, and marked life passages so as to convey messages pertinent to
universe, Earth, and life origins; the nature of birth and death;
roles according to gender, age, and class; and key mores as to how to
treat people according to those roles, within the family, the general society,
the other, the outsider.
In USA 2021, our key institutions
for knowledge and values transmission are the family, religious organizations,
social and political assemblages, and schools. Public schools are, should
be, and will be the educational institutions that represent our broadest
assertion of what we want our youth to know and value.
If we continue to fail to provide
well-identified and properly sequenced knowledge sets and to conduct vigorous
discussions as to the human values that we embrace in common, we will continue
to provide desultory education that produces a citizenry largely mired in
ignorance, with slim prospects for Life in this one earthly sojourn replete
with cultural enrichment, civic responsibility, and professional satisfaction.
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