Forces affecting educational change and school media centers

Abstract

The phenomenon of future can be attributed to the rise of our post-industrial society with its exponential technological growth and diffusion of goods and services. Further, the complexity of our technological processes can be expected to perpetrate America's shock state. As Robert Heilbroner sketches in An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, the outlook points to convulsive changes resulting from external forces rather than from conscious choice, from crisis rather than from calculation. Heilbroner's is a world view, but his comments are pertinent to the educational institution as well. In the past twenty years, changes in schools have stemmed largely from various legislative and community pressures. This article describes briefly some of these driving forces and examines a few of the emerging trends for the decade as they affect the schools and their media centers. The decade which began in 1957 with the launching of Sputnik John Goodlad aptly described as the Schooling Decade. Sputnik catalysed educational change by spurring a burgeoning of federal aid to education and, more generally, stimulating an expansion of the federal government's role in this area. The Schooling Decade was an extraordinary period in educational history, an era of exploration, innovation, and experimentation with both the federal government and private foundations financially supporting educational programs. These years of abundance were ushered in with The National Defense Education Act of 1958, which numbered among its provisions the purchase of library books, equipment, and other educational materials to strengthen the curriculum in foreign languages, science, and mathematics. Of further and far-reaching consequence to education was the Civil Rights Act