Education in a democracy has many aims. It must develop abilities in the
humanities, arts, and sciences, provide opportunities for growth in
community life, and prepare young people for responsible citizenship. It
must therefore introduce a wide range of intellectual, ethical, and
aesthetic skills and values. But education must also elicit and begin to
train the talents that are necessary for the world of work. And that task
has become increasingly complex in our technological society.
This number of On Common Ground considers some of the ways in which
schooluniversity partnerships may assist in that task.
The Essays: Some Connections
The lead essay by Secretary of Labor Robert Reich focuses on the very
disturbing loss of "pathways to the middle class." What is needed, he
argues, is "the recreation of career paths and upward mobility for
lesseducated and lessskilled Americans." That will require
new efforts to establish "common ground between secondary and
postsecondary education and between 'work' and 'school,'" directed
in large part toward such growing fields as nursing, computer information
systems, medical technology, and allied health jobs. Secretary Reich
discusses the SchooltoWork Opportunities Act, which
requires that "working relationships" be formed and maintained "between
and among partners from education, business, and the community." He notes
the broad range of partners that are becoming involved in such efforts,
the need for secondary and post secondary schools to create a
cohesive "tech prep" curriculum, and the important role to be played here
by community colleges.
Thomas W. Payzant, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary
Education in the United States Department of Education, spells out the
implications of the Goals 2000 Educate America Act and the
Improving America's Schools Act. This legislation, envisaging a
comprehensive reform, focuses on "raising the academic achievement of all
students to a high level" by supporting the efforts of states and school
districts. Payzant describes the need for universities to become involved
in state and local reform plans, and the various ways in which they can
become partners with districts in the development and implementation of
those plans.
Timothy P. Ready's essay on health science partnerships deals with
one important sector of the workforce the nation's physicians and the
difficult problem of recruiting and preparing minority students to enter
that group. He describes how Project 3000 by 2000 is now
involving medical schools in a variety of health science partnerships
with local school systems, communitybased organizations, and
undergraduate colleges. And he shows how each partner, like the nation as
a whole, stands to gain much from these joint efforts.
Partnerships with business are approached in different ways by three
other essayists. Edward Kisailus, a professor of biology, stresses the
need in today's workforce for a greater range of competencies including
resource management, interpersonal skills, information management,
systems interrelationships, and technology literacy. He suggests that
schools, universities, and business collaborate on a new paradigm of
lifelong education, which would bring together technical training,
academic content, and higher theoretical and conceptual skills.
Thomas E. Persing, a superintendent of schools, argues that in such
an effort we can learn a great deal from the system of apprenticeship in
Germany. If a comparable (though not identical) system were established
in this country, it could involve universities in various ways, and it
might lead to significant changes in the schools' approaches to many
academic subjects.
And Thomas Furtado speaks from his personal experience at United
Technologies with opportunities and difficulties in this area. Concerns
shared by business and the schools run a gamut from basic reading skills
to sequential curricula in science and mathematics. But it is clear that
we must learn to trust each other more, and to work harder, in order to
lay the groundwork for collaboration in our own communities.
Fred Hechinger's regular column deals this time with the need to
understand schooluniversity partnerships as "permanent
enterprises." Though On Common Ground is not a promotional organ,
we are grateful for Hechinger's comments on the YaleNew Haven
Teachers Institute. He offers some important warnings about the necessary
basis for attempts to replicate the Yale experience in other cities. The
Institute has long worked with groups elsewhere; and it hopes to do so
more systematically in future years. The opportunities that follow from
the Goals 2000 Act, as described by Thomas Payzant, make such
nationwide efforts all the more urgent.
The Images: Some Perspectives
Our cover illustration, which relates most closely to Secretary Reich's
essay, portrays the "instruments of power" in the United States as of
1930 but as part of a mural cycle that recognizes the need for continuing
social and economic creativity. Indeed, Thomas Hart Benton had learned a
good deal from the philosopher John Dewey, the American historian Charles
Beard, and the historian of culture Lewis Mumford. Benton's faith in
modern democracy was a faith in the power of people to make use of
technology, not to be used by it. The "instruments" are not in
themselves "aims." Wise use of technology, Benton understood, requires
continuing reform of our institutions. "Change of form," he said, "is
just as much the essence of a true democracy as it is of a living art. It
is the will and ability to change forms under the pressure of new needs
and new experience in a living, going environment, that proclaims the
very reality of democracy and makes it technically serviceable in real
government."
A major challenge in the field of education is to ensure that our
technological society is open to the talents of those of every race and
every social or economic stratum. Benton's recognition of that
challenge, at his earlier moment in our history, is evident in City
Building, the concluding panel in his mural cycle for the New School
of Social Research. This portrayal of the excavation stage of building
includes, at the left, a monumental image of a raciallymixed work
crew a bold image indeed for 1930, when prejudice still excluded blacks
from most union locals. Building Common Laborers was one of the few
unions that accepted black members.
With T. P. Ready's essay on Project 3000 by 2000, which aims to
increase minority representation in medical education, we include a
contemporary image that leads us into a child's experience of healing in
one kind of Hispanic context. Carmen Lomas Garza's Curandera
(Healer), which we reproduce with its accompanying explanatory text
in both English and Spanish, comes from her book, Family Pictures.
This book, which is designed for children, often reflects Lomas Garza's
own early experience. It was brought to our attention by Manuel N. Gsmez
of our Editorial Board.
Relating also to the theme of minorities in education is the image we
reproduce with Thomas W. Payzant's essay on the Goals 2000 Educate
America Act and the Improving America's Schools Act. This
painting, titled Playground (Recess), is by the African American
artist, Archibald J. Motley, Jr. Suggesting children's art in its naive
perspective, high horizon, and linear treatment of the figures, it evokes
the energy of playground life and also portrays the interracial harmony
that is possible there. The painting is a study for Motley's mural
project of about 1940 for the Doolittle School on East 35th Street in
Chicago. Like much of the art sponsored by the Federal Art Project of
the Works Progress Administration, those murals have since been covered
over or destroyed. This painting is now in the collection of African
American art established by Harriet O. Kelley and her husband Harmon
Kelley, M.D., an obstetrician and gynecologist. The Kelley's entire
collection will be shown at the Smithsonian Institution from April 23 to
the end of August in 1995. With Playground we include some
comments by Harriet O. Kelley that appeared in a recent issue of JAMA:
The Journal of the American Medical Association (June 15, 1994).
On the back cover, to accompany the essays on partnerships with business
by Edward Kisailus, Thomas Persing, and Thomas Furtado, we have
reproduced Charles Demuth's painting of 1921, Business. No doubt
the regular grid, the calendar, and the dominating digits in this
painting suggest an impersonal world of office work. But Demuth has here
transfigured that world through an asymmetrical composition, some
unpredictably angled and shadowy reflections of buildings, and refreshing
delicacies of tint. We can here discern the creative human factor the
basis for all our optimism about the world of work not in the explicit
"subject" of the painting but in the artist's subtle rendering of its
motifs.