Great School Legends

by Colin Greer

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140044477
• ISBN13: 9780140044478
• Release Date: December 1976
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 206 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Neo-Marxist look at American schools

Like any great folk tale, Colin Greer begins his neo-Marxist revision of American education history and the institution of public schooling in traditional fashion: "Once upon a time there was a great nation which became great because of its public schools. That is the American school legend" (p. 3). What follows is an acerbic exposé of the egalitarian rhetoric that forms the foundation of what Greer perceives to be an elitist institution that systematically fails minorities (especially Blacks) to provide a steady supply of laborers for the working class, thereby preserving the greatest capitalistic economy in the world. For Greer, public schools play only a minimal role (if any role at all) in social mobility and simply lack the power to spur radical reform necessary to eradicate poverty and social ills. Although he offers no practical solutions, Greer's main argument is that we have evaluated the school's success by its rhetorical spirit, not its actual and possible outcomes. Greer sets up his attack by painting a portrait of the legend. From its humble colonial beginnings, egalitarian rhetoric played a central role, from the Jeffersonian notion of a "natural aristocracy of talent" (p. 16) to Albert Shanker's claim that "'masses of immigrants, the poor, the illiterate. . . have achieved unprecedented upward social mobility'" (p. 21). A cursory look at current census data shows that roughly one of four African-Americans and one of five Hispanics lives at or below the poverty line, in contrast to about one out of every 13 whites (U.S. Census Bureau, 2004), giving leverage to Greer's argument. Schooling as a meritocracy only lives in the rhetoric, claims Greer. In the third chapter, Greer provides an excoriating critique of flagship American educational historians Bernard Bailyn and Lawrence Cremin. Although he credits them for construing education in its ecological sense, he indicts them both for blurring liberal rhetoric and philosophy with conservative practice and reality, thereby perpetuating the great school legend. Particularly upsetting to Greer is Cremin's apparent deference to Plato's Republic as the foundation of American public schooling: "Apparently it is quite unimportant that Plato's educational vision was based on a concept of the good society which excluded large numbers of the citizenry and indeed depended on that exclusion of its existence" (p. 49). Although I have not read Bailyn or Cremin's earliest works, Greer seems to quibble over small details and equivocal language, perhaps because he is ideologically bound by his neo-Marxist interpretation. Even though access to free schooling has been greatly increased since its inception, Greer claims that it has not been accompanied by a similar change in the relative size of the poor. Perhaps Greer has a different measure of poverty than the U.S. Census Bureau (2004), who incidentally report a 50% decrease in poverty rates between 1959 and 1971 (the very year