Custodial Obligations: Comprehensive Secondary Schools in England and in the United States

Abstract

ALMOST A DECADE AGO I. L. Kandel noted that the major issue still confronting secondary education in the United States was reflected in the goal of equality of educational opportunity.(1 Though Kandel saw this problem as one that had persisted throughout most of the twentieth century, a growing chorus of voices asserts that the necessity for providing excellence in the educational context of popular democracy is the paramount task facing American high schools today. Nor is the dilemma outlined above confined to the United States, for the need to supply more educational opportunity for their young people is common to all Western nations, particularly England, where the Labour Party advocates the reorganization of secondary schools along comprehensive lines. Alluding to the American experience, Lionel Elvin said: We are moving fast into the area of universal and longer continued secondary education, and it is not surprising that we are beginning to confront just those problems of quantity and quality which have perplexed some of your [American] educationists and allowed us a certain feeling of superiority in the past. ( Without question, the lingering crisis in race relations in the United States focuses attention on the Negroes' demands for better schooling. England, too, is beset with increasing tensions stemming from an influx of West Indians. But the issue of equality of educational opportunity goes deeper into the fabric of British and American societies. The area differentials which Robin Pedley sees illustrated in British comprehensive schools located in new housing complexes of low-income families are duplicated in numerous sectors of the United States.