American Schooling and History: an English view

Abstract

There is nothing to add to what so many observers of the Anglo-American scene have ruefully remarked: the similarities of the two cultures (in politics, food or language) serve only to trap the unwary into supposing that there are close relationships of dependence or influence, stretching uninterruptedly over the past four centuries. The error may be presented and decorated in a number of ways. It might be supposed, for example, that so blandly simple a term as 'school' does not shift its meaning in crossing the Atlantic. Or that the resonant catch words 'equality' or 'opportunity' vibrate indifferently in York and New York, or in Oxford (England) or Oxford (Mississipi). The less refined apostles of comparative education lament, and notably in international conferences, that societies should learn so little from one another's educational experiences and theories perhaps, in the latter case at least, because there is so little to learn. Polemicists have made a habit in the past twenty years of urging that the English educational system would be arrested in its headlong flight into the abyss of comprehensiveness by a judicious examination of the history of American education, or - with equal and opposite dogmatism - that it would be rescued from its narrow elitism by exposing its antique stuffiness to the bracing Atlantic breezes. If much of James D. Koerner's influential book [I] is a careful appeal to the English not to repeat what he identified as the classical American errors, against it might be set the enraptured admiration of Professor Robin Pedley for the true spirit of I776. Pedley's intemperate enthusiasm is such that it moves him to embrace within one sentence a former President of Harvard and the Founder of the Christian religion. Copernicus, Martin Luther, Charles Darwin, and beyond them Jesus of Nazareth - their's is the spirit that inspires the thought and words of America's