Introductory Comments
Public Education as the Embodiment of the Knowledge and Values
to Be Transmitted to Youth--- and Thus
Create the Future
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 2024, 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.
Alternatively,
we can create a system of Public Education---
starting with the locally centralized school district of the Minneapolis
Public Schools--- that will produce the
citizens and the nation that will give us the most fulfilling lives on this one
earthly sojourn.
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