The schools, the locality, and citizens' needs

Abstract

society. This has been part of the industrialization and modernization of the country. This paper will argue that bureaucracy and modernization have yielded a system of schools not integral to local community functioning and not meeting many needs of the local citizenry. If the schools are to become integral to local communities, we must formulate deliberate policies to produce this effect. Bureaucratization, per se, is not a negative force. As an organized means for controlling diverse and sizeable systems, it is a necessary part of the modern day. It can operate on a philosophy that, like Rousseau, sees the system and the individual at cross purposes. This kind of bureaucracy works to regularize and standardize people. It can also operate in ways that build on human differences and creative arrangements, where the products are standardized but the forms and functions may not have to be.2 Bureaucracy in the schools has generally been oriented to regularizing and standardizing-procedures, teachers' functions, curricula, children's behavior, etc. This urge for uniformity may result from major emphasis, over the past four decades, on professionalization of educators. This emphasis has yielded trained workers, via required credentialling, who become educational civil servants. The corps of educators work to keep the system functioning smoothly.