Public Education, by Lawrence A. Cremin (Basic, 97 pp., $7.95). This book—a scant 97 pages—proves that brevity does not always indicate terseness. Indeed, it proves little else. Dr. Cremin reminds us that schools are not the only institutions that teach—a fact that seems so self-evident one wonders why he devotes the bulk of the book to establishing it. He wants to see the educative potential of schools (public and private), churches, the family, the media, and even industry harnessed into one great system of “intentionality and self-consciousness about goals and processes.” The clichés that pervade this book would be merely boring if they weren’t dangerous: the notion that educational methods can be “neutral with respect to the aims of education”; the assumption that freedom of choice will be actively fostered rather than, at best, tolerated in a government-controlled educational system (interestingly, the only significant discussion of freedom is relegated to a footnote on page 66); the facile identification of “we” with the whole society, as in “the kind of public we would like to bring into being and the qualities we would like that public to display.” That last is the most disturbing of all: it obscures the often profound differences between the values and interests of the educators and those of the public. But it remains an article of faith for Dr. Cremin nonetheless—one that allows him to speak of “prophesy” (sic) as “the essential public function of the educator in a democratic society” without so much as a twinge of his democratic conscience.
VICKI MARANI
Comments