to regain educational leadership

TO R E G A I N

EDUCATIONAL

L E A D E R S H I P

A R R Y S. B R O U D Y

f ivers i ty o f I l l ino i s

Whatever the American public school system will have gained .or lost as a result of the post-Sputnik controversy, this much is distressingly clear: at a time of crisis, when leadership was desperately needed, the professional schoolman did not cut an heroic figure. It was left to James B. Conant and Hymaa G. Rickover, of Harvard University and the United States Navy (institutions not conspicuous for their interest in public education) respectively, to bail out the American secondary school as it shuddered from successive waves of criticism.

I shall not review the criticism; ce~.ainly the readers of this journal are fully aware and not a little embarrassed by the now familiar details. Instead, I shall address myself ~o the question: What sort of education in general and secondary schooling in particular is demanded by the emerging social order? I regard this question as .crucial because rightly or wrongly I believe that whoever most rapidly and accurately can foresee the educational stresses and strains imposed by changes in the social reality will be the real leaders of the American school system.

Why was American educational leadership so devoid of courage, initiative, and imagination at a time when the American public, galvanized by the rise of Sputnik, was willing to under- take mighty feats in schooling? Was this a proper fruition of a century of work in educational theory and research? Did the profession, al educator f a t in leadership because he lacked knowledge about test conduction, the best methods of teaching spelling, the most economical methods of erecting school buildings? Did he lack skill in the making of textbooks? Were our educational psychologists backward about studying the learning and teaching process?

I think not. So far as means were concerned, the American professional educator had built up a respectable armory of knowledge and research skill. In proof whereof, it need only

To R e g a i n E d u c a t i o n a l L e a d e r s h i p

be noted that once the ends of schooling were given to them by President ,Conant, the mighty admiral, and the Ford Foundation, not to mention Time and Life magazines, the professional educators became as busy as the missile men themselves. Research, experimental projects, institutes, and workshops were conceived in their minds and ~tourished in their hands. Once their noses were pointed in the general direction of the quarry, our keen- scented researchers, promoters, and administrators showed zeal and ingenuity in abundance, z

Was the fault perhaps that American schoolmen lacked a theory about the good life, the good society, and the educational enterprise whereby to gauge their strategy and tactics?

To this question one cannot give a simple negative. In one sense, many schoolmen did operate on the theory that the less theory the better. They did not intend by this rejection to deny that schoolmen needed some kind of "philosophy." On the contrmo/, they always began by proclaiming their "philosophy of education." When analyzed this "philosophy" turned out to be ,a set of statements about what was good in life and what the school should d.o to help the pupil to achieve it. Their rejection of theory was not the rejection of value commitments, but indicated rather the unwillingness to examine their justification and a lack of awareness that justification was needed.

What were these value commitments? It is not unfair to say that for most school .administrators, and perhaps for most public school teachers, they were the values of whatever social group was dominant in their community. In farm communities, it would be made up of successful farmers and small business men. In urban communities, small businessmen, representatives of industry and finance, and the professional men set the value tone of the schools. They set it implicitly rather than explicitly - by being accepted as value models of the good life. School people, insofar as they adopted the model, shaped the school in its image. The point here is not so much whether these values were good or bad, but rather that the school people derived them i uncritically from their social milieu. Such uncritical acceptance has often been made into a virtue of school administra-

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1 Did the critics want more science, more mathematic:s, more languages, more attention to the gifted? Work the critics had not heard about leaped ahead; new hunts after new curricula, teaching styles and talent were instituted. Lack of competence? Certainly not. Not only did our educational researchers respond competently, but in doing so they also acquired the life style of our new culture heroes, the missile teams. They adopted their parlance and mien; their conferences and meetings; their modes of travel and amusement.

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tion, i.e., to consult the dominant groups and interests of a community in order to determine the .goals of the school, and it has been dignified with the scientific jargon of public relations so that the pulse-taking acquires its own professional technique and mystique, a

There are worse ways of formulating goals than by col suiting the school's patrons and customers; hoe are the dominant members of the community its least intelligent and go0d-hearted citizens by any manner of means. However, two observations need to be made about this method o,f determining educational policy. One is tk, at educational leadership is forever placed outside the hands of the schoolman, because the schoolman's leadership has been converted into the expertise of foUowership, The other point is that the locus of wisdom about a society's emerging needs and values lies in a prospective rather than a retrospective understanding of the social reality. If this reality is changing rapidly, then the success .routes of the society also are likely to change rapidly so that the persons now dominant in the social order are not always reliable indices of future success requirements. Thus, the role of science and mathematics in the success routes of the Sixties could hardly have been discerned by reading the dailies or by attending the luncheon meetings of our service clubs in the Forties. Since fundamental changes in the social order presage power and status shifts, the schoolman, if he is to lead, cannot at any given time afford to perceive social reality exclusively through the lenses of the dominant group.

Nevertheless, it would be odd to blame the future of leadership on a lack of theory when so much of the criticism took off precisely from the charge that public schools had been ruined by theoreticians who pontificated about the social order and school practice. Was not the point of floe offensive against John Dewey and his Progressive derivatives, real and alleged, that they were excessively doctrinaire?

Of course, some of the criticism came from those who disliked the doctrine itself on philosophical or political grounds ,

2 It is only natural for school administrators to be members of the Rotary, Kiwanis, and other service organizations. These clubs select for membership the outstanding representatives of the dominant value schema of the community. The local newspaper is their orgaan of expression. If the school administrator is ever in doubt as to what is good, right, and beautiful he need never wait for more than a week to find out. At the weekly luncheon of the club the value norms of the culture will be reaffirmed in speech, song, ritual, and fellowship.


but this is a somewhat different matter. Whatever one may say in this regard, the educational philosophers of the Thirties were reflective and critical. They did not discover the goals of school and society simply by reading the daily press or attending service club luncheons. They did try to interpret the pulse of social reality. They did have a theory of the good life and especially of what democracy ought to mean in the life of the citizen. 135 Finally, there is little doubt that they translated this theory into projected curricula and teaching methodologies.

Two points, it seems to me, need to be noted before assaying the role of these theories in our present problem. First, that they pervaded educational literature, from treatise to text- book. This dominance is witnessed by the fact that their termi- nology became virtually standard in the profession. Second, that the number of administrators and teachers who spoke this language fluently correlated poorly with effects on school practice. Accordingly, this school of thought deserves neither the praise nor blame that has been heaped upon it. Indeed, it is very dit~cult to assess how much of each it does deserve. For example, it affected the elementary school more than the secondary, but insofar as it contributed to the notion of the secondary school as an adolescent rehearsal of life; as ,a training ground for dealing with adolescent problems (including those of living in a social order dominated by middle-aged people), it did affect the development of that unique institution called the American comprehensive high school.

If I single out this type of theory for extended comment, it is not, therefore, because it was dominating secondary school practice. Youth study after youth study in the Thirties showed that most American high schools, either from choice ,or motives of economy, were devoting themselves to the college preparatory curriculum. Even today, according to the Conant study and numerous .other surveys, at lot of consolidation will be needed before the comprehensive high school can become a reality in many, many parts of the .country. Aside from the commercial curriculum, most high schools have given only indirect vocational training. As for life-adjustment theory, it probably has affected practice in the secondary school no more than Dewey's emphasis on problem-solving. The notion of life adjustment has influenced, one would surmise, the guidance and counseling services of the secondary school more than its instructional program, de- risive instances of courses in dating and driver education not- withstanding.

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There were counter theories, such as those of Thomism, old and new, and .Humanisms of various hues, but, in the professional literature, they were regarded as benighted protests against the enlightenment of Instrumentalism, Experimentalism, and Pragmatism. Certainly these minority views cut very little ice with the important educational philosophers, curriculum theorists, and teacher training specialists in the last two decades. Nor, for that matter, with the administrators either until their business and professional friends turned on them after Sputnik. If educational theory was a factor in the loss of leadership, and if by theory is meant an articulated set of value statements and their "equivalent" educational prescriptions, then it is the Dewey- derived theory that stands at the bar ,of judgment.

Are we then to blame the Progressive theories of education for being false or wrong? I happen to believe that rather than being false, instrumentalism is incomplete and insufficiently aware of its philosophical ancestors. Its educational prescriptions suffer from the same infirmities. This is not, however, the occasion to argue these issues. I prefer to argue that these philosophers, despite their genuine social concern, and despite their avowed willingness to accommodate themselves to cultural necessities, misconstrued these necessities. What was the nature of this misconstruction?

The educational demands generated by a m a s s democracy geared to science-based technology differ fundamentally from those generated by a social matrix based on private enterprise in the hands of small farmers, businessmen, artisans, and professional workers. This by now should be a truism.

The philosophers of education who were most sensitive to this social change nevertheless counseled an educational formula that did not take into account the pervasiveness and depth of that change and its import for life and education. Their opponents, for the most part, either deplored the change, or refused to believe it had occurred. In any event they fell back on the college preparatory course in high school as the panacea for all social and educational ills.

We were alerted by Karl Marx to the social effects of large-scale machine industry. 3 There was no lack of prophets foretelling the coming of the mass society and its threat to the

3 Robert Beck points out that the criticisms of American culture made by Erich Fromm and David Riesman had already been familiar to readers of Marx, TSnnus, Durkheim, and Weber a half century before. See his "Perception of Individu- alism in American Culture and Education," EDUCATIONAL THEORY, XI (July, 1961), 129-145.


individualistic liberalisms of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Around the turn of ~ae present century it was clear to John Dewey, for example, that the relatively happy integration among vocation, citizenship, and self-development achieved by the artisan, farmer and tradesman in the American small town was being jeopardized by urbanization. 4 Indeed, it can now be seen that Dewey's Democracy and Education was a valiant, albeit vain, attempt to restore community among men and among the various activities of eaeh man by making the school an ideal community.

With the hindsight ,of more than a half century it is, of course, easy to see that Dewey was writing the epilogue rather than the prologue of an era; an era in which economic individu- alism accomplished its historic mission and, to use a M.arxian notion, generated the seeds of its own decline. The massive collectivization of life and the democratization of the masses, as Karl Mannehim saw, were movements that could not be stemmed once the economic modes of production became collectivized and thoroughly interdependent. Somewhat ironically, however, the eolleetivization did not always result in a revolt of the masses; on the contrary, in our own country it raised their standard of living to the point where we are hard put to find material status symbols suitable for class distinctions.

Educational remedies for these social problems were vigor- ously discussed in the q~hirties and Forties by Dewey, Rugg, Counts, Raup, and many others who came to constitute the ranks of the Progressive and Reconstructionist movements. Ignor- ing the many interesting variations in emphasis one can, I believe, characterize these remedies as methods of achieving what R. Bruce Raup has called "uncoerced consensus" in the face of value conflicts. The consensus would have the method- ological virtues of the scientific method, the political virtues of democracy, and the pedagogical virtues of highly effective learning. Dewey's faith in intelligence was to be supplemented by the therapeutic techniques of group dynamics. These would set aright group members whose intelligence was being blocked or subverted by non-rational factors.

The strategy of this approach was based on the assumption that an educational system which predisposed individuals to

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41 recommed Lewis F. Feuer's "John Dewey and the Back to the People Movement in American Thought," JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, XX (October- December, 1959), 545-568, for an interesting discussion of Dewey's reform activities in his Michigan and Chicago periods.


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perform intelligently in small groups would eventually enable the individual to achieve about the same virtues and satisfactions and in about the same ways as he did in the days before the social order had undergone massive collectivization. In other words, the citizen could make up his own mind on political questions; he could make economic decisions on the basis of his wishes and his judgment, and he could stand behind his actions as a morally responsible agent. In short, he could play the role of the free American man embodied in the American creed and dream in 1950 as he did in 1780, provided only that he become somewhat more sophisticated and active with respect to social engineering.

I submit that this assumption is no longer viable, and I shall contend that massive collectivization has radically changed the conditions ,and ground rules for achieving the qualities of life that were envisioned as essential to hhe individual rational man. We can either abandon the quest for these qualities and seek new kinds of satisfactions in their place. Or we can ask: What forms of individuality are still possible in the new society? What behavioral forms will they take? What sort of knowledge and attitudes will these new forms require? Those who choose the first alternative need read no further.

If I am correct, it follows that to regain educational initiative and to solve the crisis of secondary school education, rather than to tread water while non-educational forces resolve it, we must examine what vocation, citizenship, .and self-development mean in the mass democratic society and what these new meanings call for in the way of curriculum.

The most important single feature of the modern mass society is that it depends on science-founded technology. This familiar fact produces dialectical results however, only when it becomes a dominant factor in all major areas of life. For example, so long as the bulk of our economic activity was controlled by individual farmers, artisans, and businessmen, the presence of shoe factories and textile mills produced ,only local strains, and one could meaningfully continue to talk about economic freedom for the individual or, at least, for large numbers of them. But when even "independent" entrepeneurs and professional men depend for their living ,on serving large-scale enterprises as sub-contractors, distributors, or agents, the meaning of economic freedom changes qualitatively as well as quantitatively.

What is a possible new meaning of economic freedom in this type of society? First of all, freedom to choose among


occupations is probably greater than it has ever been before and, with increased mobility, geographical economic options are also more numerous than before. Granting limits of talent and ~ ' :~- ing, there are so many gradations of occupation within a given line of work that a person is really stretching thL~ags a bit to say that his freedom of occupational ehoiee has been seriously abrogated by the mass production technology.

The freedom that is abrogated is not so much of initial choice as of subsequent decisions. If one has to work in large organizations or in smaller satellites of such organizations, as most of us have to, then one has to eonform to modes of work and thought that are not alterable by the individual as an individual. Whereas at one time the craftsman, businessman, or farmer had more or less complete control of his product or operation from beginning to end, today this is less and less the case. Whether it is a physician, lawyer, accountant, or a production line worker who is being questioned, he will point out that much of what he does is nothing over which he has any direct choice. To gain the benefits of large-scale organization, whether it be in the diagnosis of disease, the conduct of research, or the production of refrigerators, we must sacrifice individual freedom of decision at the key points of policy formation.

That it would be better to have both the freedom and the benefits goes without question. This, I believe, is where the social reformers of the Thirties tended to go astray. We cannot automatically and in the same sense have both, and we have chosen the benefits. This means that the benefits will have to be exploited for n e w economic f r eedom- freedom such as the independent farmer and businessman did not have or need and, indeed, could not have had. While I cannot explore this very far in this essay, it may not be amiss to indicate the forms that the freedom can take and is already taking.

I realize that as citizens we can in a democratic society exert some control over the economic enterprise. Nor am I unmindful that by collective bargaining, collective insurance, collective security, we can exert great power over our individual economic destinies. These powers, welcome as they are, do not really restore individual freedom in the sense that it has been lost; but they do reduce ~ae number of hostages we give to fortune. It may be, however, that so far as earning a living is concerned the new freedom may have to mean n,ot the restora- tion of individuals as economic units, but rather to devaluate enormously the role of earning a living in the total economy

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of life. The very system that has reduced the individual's freedom occupationally may help to free him from it psychologically. With automation and new forms of power, earning a living may well become a peripheral rather than a central principle of life and one's key significance may not be sought there. This is not escapism either. If the System needs only four hours of our daily dutiful attention, has not the "job" become a necessary but insufficient condition of the good life? A~nd is this bad? Horribly bad, if we are not educated for the humane use of the other 20 hours; perhaps wonderfully good, if we are.

Even when all economic activity becomes integrated into a mass production system, if there remain, other types of activity not so integrated, it still makes sense to speak of citizenship and self-development as individual in character. One can, it is argued, be an authentic individual in the non-economic aspects of life despite the collectivization of the economic sector.

But when ideas about art and international relations, about the good life and the bad are mass distributed as automobiles are mass distributed, the phrases "thinking for oneself, . . . . acting for oneself," and "forming one's own tastes" become ambiguous. The old meanings cannot automatically be attached to these phrases in the new situation. It is not that these terms become meaningless in the sense of referring to noflaing in reality, but rather that that to which they do refer is something that in terms of behavior may be quite different, s

II

I now turn to several consequences of the centrality of mass production techniques based on science and techology. My first objective is to exarrfine the meaning and educational requirements of what I shall call "political wisdom" in a mass demoeratic society.

1. If modern production of goods and services, communica- tions, military devices, tastes and ideas are increasingly depend- ent on science-based technology, then whoever possesses science 8

5For example, I have discussed the behavioral changes to which the word " f reedom" can refer in PARADOX AND PROMISE: ESSAYS IN AMERICAN LIFE AND EDUCATION (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1961).

6 It has been estimated that the current number of American astronomers is around 1000; physicists, 10,000; chemists, 100,000, and that about one-tenth of these produce almost all of the creative research and publications. John R. Platt, "On Thinking as a Chain Reaction," SATURDAY REVIEW, XLIV (September 6, 1961), 39-41.


and technology is in a strategic power position. If it is true that scientific knowledge and complex technological know-how is the possession of the relatively few, then these elites come to occupy strategic power positions in the society. I am not saying that they will exercise this power, but insofar as enterprises of all kinds would flounder without them, these elites have an enormous potential for social control. Why they do not exercise 141 this power will be discussed below.

For the present, one may note that important as are the intellectual and technological elites in an industrialized society, the masses are no less so. Without mass consumption the balloon of mass production collapses. The consequence of this relation- ship is not, however, as Marx insisted, the inevitable war between the "exploiting" capitalists and the "exploited" proletariat. Nor is it the simple domination of the masses by managerial, military, political elites. On the contrary, because the elites and the masses are essential to each other, i.e., necessary to each other's existence, they are locked in an embrace that is no less fierce for being involuntary and not always joyful.

A corollary of this development is that increasingly every man, by virtue of his vocational specialty, acquires a bit of elitism. Thus, the automobile mechanic becomes more and more indispensable and his skill more esoteric as automobiles become more complex and their sub-mechanisms more delicate. Only the most courageous do-it-yourselfer undertakes to repair the automatic transmission mechanism of his car. For one thing, 'he probably does not have the specialized tools needed for the job, and they are too .costly to acquire. On the other hand, even the most sophisticated elitist is probably a member of the masses with respect to everything save his speciality. This dua l role, imposed on all of us, sadly interferes with our efforts to main- tain a proper perspective on ourselves involving, as it does, a constant shifting from a position of relative power to that of relative impotence.

An even more important consequence of this polarization of the population into elites and masses is that power is also polarized. The exercise of power by the elites depends to a large extent on the consent of the masses and that of the masses on the knowledge and skill of the elites that support the system as a whole. Either side can ruin the game by withdrawing from it or by destroying the other side. If we call the power of coordinating all activities within society "political" .control, then in a highly interdependent mass production society political

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power is truly the sovereign power. Can there be a genuinely democratic control of power in

modern mass society? This question becomes central when it is realized that it involves cooperation among scientific-technological elites of all sorts as well as with the masses. The dangers are that the elites by being custodians of theory and know-how (even of the means of persuasion) will establish a tyranny of the expe r t s - a total bureaucracy. Or, that the masses with their ballot, purchasing power and labor power will make decisions on the basis of transitory passion or limited views of self- interest; or that the masses, organized in blocs, will blindly follow their leaders, i.e., their own experts, in a struggle for power.

Certain characteristics of the mass social order make it unlikely that any one set of experts can seize political power, i.e., the coordinating power needed for top-level decisions. As an example, let us look briefly at the possibility of scientists, now in such a strategic position, assuming a dominant political role, as some of them somewhat belatedly believe they should. That they have not done so and that they will not do so in the foreseeable future is, I believe, due to two circumstances: in our time, intellectual distinction is based as much on ignorance as on knowledge, which means simply that distinction is a function of specialization; a specialist has the privilege of being ignorant in all fields but his own; the greater his distinction as a specialist, the greater the ignorance he is permitted. Conse- quently, distinction in an intellectual field is a fair guarantee of indifferent competence in the art of politics. The second fact is that scientists are men who, r~ot heeding the admonitions of Plato, have encumbered their search for truth with wives, chil- dren, bank accounts, and a love of honor and status. They have granted so many hostages to fortune that it is relatively easy for the politician to control their scientific activities. Examples are numerous enough not to warrant belaboring the point at this time. One need only mention that scientists Teller and Pauling would have us do diametrically opposed things with regard to nuclear devices. Scientist Fuchs thought the Russian statesmen were more to be trusted with the atomic bomb than the British; German scientists are working, presumably with equal zeal, for the West and the East, and the Nazis managed to find scientists for whatever enterprises they regarded as necessary for the glory of the Third Reich, not excluding the experiments at Dachau. Finally, Russian scientists are not de-


feeting to the West in appreciable numbers. The crux of the question about political competence is

whether a non-specialist in domains A, B, C . . . N can understand and assay what specialists in domains A, B, C . . . N say and bring their findings to bear on problems to which they are relevant.

Clearly the man with what I shall refer to as "political 143 wisdom" has to deal with questions that are molar rather than atomic. Our political problems not only have dimensions in virtually every domain of organized knowledge, but in the realms of value as well. Each domain of organized knowledge is a kind of categoreal grid through which a social problem is perceived and interpreted. Economics provides one grid, biology another, physics another, geography still another. The greater the number of relevant grids the more complicated the problem and the greater is the cognitive demand made on the problem solver. r

Or, ff another metaphor is needed, let the various domains of knowledge be regarded as several kinds of maps, each reveal- ing different features of the problem. Now clearly the citizen, nnlike the specialist, cannot utilize a highly detailed map written in a complex code even ff 'he has one. Nevertheless, a map can be accurate and helpful even ff much of the detail is omitted. For the citizen, therefore, the kind of knowledge needed is like that afforded by clear, large, outline maps on which a social problem can be plotted and its essentials put into focus. This sort of knowledge we derive from ~general studies.'"

Knowledge about various domains of experience is a necessary ingredient in political wisdom. 8 The materials so learned and the methods of learning them together constitute the arts of ascertaining troth. They manifest themselves in the individual

7 This distinction is related to that between scientific facts and value-pervaded "world-facts" made by John Wild in "Is There a World of Ordinary Language?" PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW, LXVII (October, 1959), 460-476. Here the point is that different types of problems require different tactics of thinking. Later in this paper the types of knowledge needed for general education will also be related to this distinction.

8Consider, for example, the problem of dealing with the threatened water famine in the United States. In an article by W. $. Gillam and J.W. McCutchan, "Demineralization of Saline Waters," ~CIENCE, CXXXIV, (October 13, 1961), 1041- 1048. Problems are brought together that call for knowledge of law, economics, geography, demography, chemistry, physics, and other disciplines. The legislator (and citizens) have already made decisions about pilot research projects in this field and will, in the near future, have to make others on the basis of diverse expert findings and opinions. I wonder how many high school graduates could "read" this article with understanding.


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by a facility with the language of a given discipline, an ac- quaintance with its rules of inquiry and evider~ce, its major facts and theories.

In addition to familiarity with the terrain of the major disciplines, the political thinker also requires the art of adjusting perspective. By this I mean the art of ascertaining the import of particular events for the human enterprise as a whole. In the mature human beil~g, the reference frame for such judgments is a hierarchical value set together with principles and rules that allow him to make a logical connection among values, policies, and proposals for action.

Finally, the grids of knowledge and maps of value have to be combined by the processes of deliberation, decision, and commitment. Each of these, in turn, is a complicated a f fa i r - so complicated that many thinkers have given up the 'hope of dealing with them rationally. Others, while less skeptical, have despaired of deliberately teaching people how to be practically wise, although not denying the possibility of practical wisdom.

For those who are committed to the possibility of democratic control of a mass democracy, the teachability of political competence is an unavoidable postulate. To make the postulate viable does not entail, however, that all aspects of such competence be teachable in the school. Some of the knowledge com- ponents listed as required for molar problem solving certainly can be taught and are being taught. The needed value perspec- tives can also be taught, although not perhaps by the same methods as the knowledge. As for the skill of putting them together in a concrete molar problem situation, this, too, can be learned, but, so far as I .can make out, only by practising the art on sample problems. What the school cannot provide is the experience and maturity that life alone can give, but this only means that the secondary school cannot guarantee political competence; only some of the teachable prerequisites thereof. 9

This brief sketch of the ingredients of political competence seems to indicate that it is not so esoteric as to be impossible for most normal intellects, but several points aeed to be noted:

1. The knowledge needed is "general" and is to be distin-

9Molar problem solving is a teachlng-learning problem for any enterprise that proposes to utilize diverse types of data, e.g., administration. Reviewing James L. McCamy's SCIENCE AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION (1"uscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1961), Wallace R. Brode remarks that there is a lack of dlseusslon on how one learns to make decisions on scientific facts, and on what basis and how one integrates scientific, political, and social facts. SCIENCE, CXXXlV (October 6, 1961), 999.


guished from the study of the various disciplines as the specialist studies them. The prospective specialist may profit from a general study, but it is far less likely that a "general" use accrues automatically from a specialized study. In the current rush to "hard" subjects in the secondary school is there sufficient concern that these subjects will be taught so as to have "general" use? Or, if you like, about their use in the arts of citizenship?

2. At least three kinds of activity were listed under problem solving. They cannot all be acquired or perfected by the assignment-drill-recitation method of teaching. Are the advocates of both the subject matter ,and the life adjustment curricula ready to make these distinctions and to organize the program so as to prvoide for all these diverse outcomes?

8. Political competence, so far as I can see, is a lost objective in the post-Sputnik churnings of secondary education. This is understandable. Survival comes first. Nevertheless, I believe that the indifference is also due to the beliefs that (a) the arts of citizenship need not be taught formally or (b) that rehearsing life problems in school is the way to teach them. I have tried to show that in our emerging society the first belief is dangerously naive and that the second is no less so, albeit for a different reason.

4. The current high school curricula are inadequate because neither the traditional subject matter curriculum nor the life adjustment curriculum are sufficiently general in the sense of "general" indicated. The former gets people ready for college - w h i , ch may or may not get them ready for wise political activity; the latter forms useful social attitudes and skills but rarely inculcates the knowledge needed for political thinking. Neither affords the student an intense and profound encounter with the value exemplars of our culture; both ignore or dissipate the value-forming power of the aesthetic dimension of life and school. Neither, alone, provides the knowledge, perspective, and the skills required for political competence in our time.

Should political education be given to all American youth in the secondary school? That political education at the secondary level in a democracy should be common education, i.e., given to all, seems to follow easily from the principle that all citizens should participate in the making of social policy. Nevertheless, the experience of Great Britain, France, and the Scandinavian countries would seem to afford a counterexample, because no- body questions the democratic nature of their political systems and yet these apparently have been compatible with a dual

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track school system at the secondary level This system operates on the assumption that six yeats or so of schooling in the common branches give the masses sufficient intellectual iustnnnents for political wisdom. That is to say, they have enough knowledge and skill to choose among alternatives proposed by the various political parties.

The erueial question is, of course, what it takes in the way of formal schooling to understand the arguments on all sides of the issue. At one time literacy was probably suflleient. Today, ordinary literaey is at a lower premium than it was when the newspaper was the ehief mass medium of communication. With radio and television earrying information and discussion on public affairs, literacy as such is no longer so distinctive in its importance as it onee was.

On the other hand, as I have tried to indicate, the con. eeptual apparatus needed for understanding social issues is today far greater than it ever has been. For example, the deeisious union members now have to make on contracts and strikes presuppose a knowledge of the financial and industrial system that is well beyond the reach of ordinary literacy or knowledge of the common branehes.

It is for this reason that the union m e m b e r - and we might add the businessman and the physician-increasingly is tempted to rely on the head of his union to make the issues plain to him and to advise him on a decision. I t is not that union members have become sheep because the union boss has become powerful, but rather the bloc leader has become powerhd because the individual members have neither the time nor the cognitive competence to study these matters for themselves.

Sensible as it is for each bloe to hire experts to serve as its collective political brain, there is a point at whieh the de- pendence on the expert eaneels out the freedom of individual decision. A form of low-grade freedom is still possible in this situation, e.g., when the individual goes through the motions of listening to arguments by experts on both sides and voting for one or the other. But unless the individual understands the arguments and issues so that the choice has some semblance of rationality, the freedom of the choice is formal to the point of emptiness.

How long democracy in modern mass society can survive on this formal freedom is hard to say. Tradition and cultural momentum can. no doubL ~uide the masses on massive issues


when the alternatives are bipolar and the consequences of each easily imaginable. But when affairs have reached this stage, it is perhaps too late for rational decision and perhaps for democracy as well. That the dual-track system worked well in situations requiring little more from the masses than an expression of their sentiment does not mean that it will work well when democracy requires from its masses intelligent judgment 147 about the ,complex alternatives proposed by the experts. 10

To what extent the cognitive demands of citizenship dis- courage participation in political activity is hard to estimate. Robert A. Dalai in a recent study, 11 notes that for most people politics is a "remote, alien, and unrewarding activity," not a normal interest. Yet one of his findings, viz., that a college education is particularly important in inducing people to use their political resources at a high rate, may be a promising due.

At this jtmeture we may as well anticipate the inevitable objection: Can a program of general studies ever be common in high school? By definition such studies are symbolic, abstract, and thcoretical. Can the noncollege-bound, the nonacademic youth profit from such a curriculum?

The answer to these embarrassing questions can only be a guess, but ff the proportion of the college-bound high school pupils increases, as it seems to be doing; ff more vocations will require general studies as prerequisites for post-secondary schooling, then we can be a bit more opfimi.~tie. But I would place even greater trust in the recent curriculum research which shows that abstract studies are not so formidable as we once thought - f f taught in terms of theory rather than as items for simple recall ~ Nevertheless, it may well be necessary to vary the abstraction level of the general studies to meet vaaations in scholastic ability, or to vary the time spent on them, or to fashion some combination of both. This would be less compli- eated than to construct different eurricola or tracks to meet differences in ability, inelinatiou, and projected needs.

10 The consideration as to whether a dual-track system is or is not compatible with the notion of equalily is important but not to the point in question.

11 Robert A. Dahl, "Who Participates in Local Politics and Why/" SCIENCE. CXXXIV (October 27, 1961), 1340-1348.

12 This research, by the way, promises to provide another assignment for the philosophy of education. To what extent are the advocates of learning by discovery, e.g., J.$. Bruner and others, casting doubts and aspersions on the efficacy and necessily of teaching by means of meaningful verbalized concepts? To what extent are the discovery advocates the allies or foes of the Progressive doctrines such as


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It may be objected, however, that common needs with respect to political education do not imply that needs for vocational education and education for self-development are also common. It might then follow that the secondary school curriculum should contain a core of general studies and skills for political education, but that a variety of offerings should be made available for the other two outcomes of education.

But what ff preparation for vocation and self-development at the secondary level also requires general studies and skills?

As to vocational education two points need to be noted:

1. Students of the labor market point out that automation and other developments in the industrial complex will increase the demand for professional workers, technicians, and workers who can manipulate symbols of all sorts. All of these trends, it is anticipated, will lengthen the period of vocational preparation beyond the secondary school. But they will also tend to diminish the differences among various types of prevocational preparation. That is to say, the high school may be called upon to give about the same kind of preparation to the boy who is to study to become an electronic technician as it will give to the boy who is to enter the engineering school.

2. As vocational training proper becomes a post-secondary function, the high school can be relieved of the responsibility for direct vocational training.

As to self-developmental education the situation is more complicated than with vocational training. For one thing, the meaning of self-development is, at best, vague. While it is easy enough to equate it with self-realization in all value areas, its meaning at a given time in a given .culture depends on what it takes to be a high-grade person in that culture. High grade, in turn, is defined, for all practical purposes, by what the experts, i.e., the connoisseurs within a given value area say is high grade.

In the 19th century, schooling for self-development or self-

learning by doing, permissive child rearing, and child-centered school practices? It is up to the philosopher, I suppose, to see to it that doctrinal bed fellows are properly sorted out, or at least properly introduced to each other. For the curriculum designer, however, the research has been an unqualified boon, because it has broken down the notion that arid verbalism and anti-intellectual activities are the only alternatives for curriculum design. Accordingly, we can more freely choose modes of learning activity adapted to school outcomes, and we do not have to tailor our outcomes so that they conform to one type of learning act iv l ty - - the one at the moment fashionable in the "l iterature."


realization or self-cultivation was provided by the Humanities and the fine arts. These not only provided perspective but a perspective certified by centuries of study and assessment. The literature and the arts were classic, summing up the best value models of the past. The first-rate man embodied a combination of the Aristotelian and Christian virtues with enough of the world's substance to give both a chance for free exercise.

Men and women in a position to profit from such self- cultivation formed small but fairly tight publics for their contemporary authors and artists. It was not difficult, as Karl Mann- helm has noted, 13 for the intellectual elites to set the tone of the arts and to fix the canons of taste. They were the taste- makers and the masses imitated them gladly, charmed by the creative minority, to use one of Arnold Toynbee's phrases.

In a mass democracy, however, the masses need not follow the lead of the elite; by their purchasing power, they r~ow can set their own norms. Motion picture producers, publishers, television producers are anxious to serve up what the masses will buy. They insist that they cannot afford to do otherwise.

Several consequences flow from this development. First, the standards established by the masses are not those of the connoisseur; they are not the product of a cultivated, studied taste. Accordingly, it requires little formal preparation to enjoy the art and literature that is designed to captivate a mass audience.

Second, the development of the mass media of entertain- ment and ideas makes easily accessible precisely the type of literature and art that do not require effort or study to enjoy. As a result, individuality of taste and value is more difficult to attain than it would be in societies where mass media are not so fully developed. It is no longer merely a matter of studying the classics in the Humanities and the fine arts and facing the world with the serenity and perspective they afford. On the contrary, the person wishing to live authentically, i.e., in a way that reflects his own thought and taste, has first to struggle against the massive pressures of the collective ways of doing and feeling that everywhere impinge upon him.

The question as to why individuality is so important is too often by-passed, yet much of our problem is occasioned by the fact that it seems to have a value all out of proportion

13 Karl Mannheim, MAN AND SOCIETY IN AN AGE OF RECONSTRUCTION (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940).

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to the cost of acquiring it. One can only appeal to the obser- vation that human beings somehow believe that their "human- ness" depends on the degree to which they shape their own lives in accordance with what they conceive to be their character or value commitment. To do this is to be free and to live authentically. To develop one's self, therefore, is not merely to realize the communal values, but to realize them in a form perceived as compatible with the person's image of his own ultimate oommitment.

Thus it is, that the more available, sweet, and comfortable the ready-made goods of life become, the harder it is both to meet the demands of individuality and to forget them. Boredom, the search for excitement and distraction, resorts to the bizarre and sensational, to the perverse and the violent, are thus regarded as tell-tale signs of man's inability either to renounce or to fulfill the need for authenticity. The educational requirements for self-development in our time, therefore, are not so easily specified as they were in the previous century.

The curriculum task is to seek out examples of value experiments of the race that will make the learner vividly aware of the potentialities of human life. The classics in philosophy, literature, and the fine arts are highly individual expressions of the authentic human state in a given culture; they say what freedom meant in that culture, But each age has to define and express what authenticity means for itself, and so it is to contemporary philosophy and art that we have to turn for the prologue of an era, just as we turn to the classics for the epilogue of an era,

One cannot be firee wRhout having absorbed the tradition of freedom through the r attempts to express it, but neither can one shape his be/ng without using the schemata and categories of his own time, Ctautcs and signifieant contemporary exemplars have this in r they both are goads to divine discontent with the mudtocre and the trivial, and in rhi.~ sense they are goads to ludtvldtmltty,

Such outcomes for lelf-developmental education cannot be expected from survey c o u r t s tn the arts or the history of ideas - a l though these n~y l~ve a place for achieving another type of outcome. The exemplars l~ve to be few and impressive enough so that an intensive study of them Is both possible and defensi- ble. They operate more via the imagination as value models than through cognition as sources of information.

I would like to emphasize that this is not a proposal to


reinstate the classics as the curriculum design for the American high school. The classics are not proposed as sources of knowledge about the world or even about value. I have argued that these outcomes are secured through other materials organized in other ways. What then is the learning role of an example or of an exemplar?

A value example is a concrete manifestation of a principle, 151 a way of life, a value hierarchy, a mood or an attitude towards life. It is a particular that lends itself to construction and reconstruction by the imagination; it is apprehended by an aesthetic intuition of a kind of presentational symbolism. The recent tossing around of the word "image" is merely a recognition of the role of the aesthetic judgment in value formation, value acceptance, and value rejectance. Although works of art are commonly associated with image-making and image-getting, theologies and philosophies also lend themselves to imaginative translation into life-styles, personality-styles, society styles, etc.

The exemplar, therefore, clarifies or exhibits complex ideational-affectional syndromes by means of images. Its role is to clarify rather than to explain or persuade. Images contribute to value orientation and hierarchies only by providing a vivid display of selected value perspective from the past and the present.

If I have set this aspect of the curriculum apart from the others it is because I believe that "imaginative" or "appreciative" learnings have a structure that in some senses is unique, and that they will not accrue automatically as by-products of other types of learning; also perhaps because even literature is so often taught in our high schools for extra-aesthetic values that could be achieved more economically by other means.

In summary, then, all three types of education-for vocation, for citizenship, and for se l f -development- in a mass society converge on a common curriculum of general studies and cognitive skills.

I l l

We come now to the questions: What will make a curriculum general? What will justify a subject or activity being required of everyone?

The first question must seek its answer in the nature of the subject to be studied. If it deals with concepts and cognitive structures found in a wide variety of experience it is highly


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general and vlee versa. The second question has to do with the use made .of knowledge by the individual and by the social order. Thus, a highly general study used rarely or only by a very small proportion of the population would not be required o~ everyone. This reduces us to subjects of study that are both widely used and highly general.

What has already been said about the educational requirements for vocation, citizenship, and personal development should suggest that the use of knowledge by a specialist differs from its use by a nonspecialist; that learning how to acquire knowledge differs from learning how to use knowledge and that both differ from learning to appreciate some example of value em- bodiment. In other words, each type of learning may well entail its own distinctive strategy of teaching. A curriculum design, therefore, is more than a list of subjects or activities. It contains a content arranged for instruction to secure certain school outcomes: knowledge, skills, and attitudes to be embodied in the learner's behavior.

I have found a suggestion for both dimensions of the problem in Joseph T. Tykociner's Research as a S c i e n c e - Zetetics 14 which classifies knowledge with respect to the function it per- forms, or, more accurately, by the role that each science plays in the totality of our knowledge.

By a rough adaptation of the Tykociner classification we can say that bodies of knowledge can be characterized as follows:

t. Bodies of knowledge that serve as the symbolic tools of thinking, communication, and learning. These include the language of ordinary discourse of logic, of quantity, and of art. For instruction they have to be organized into conceptual systems or hierarchies of skills. They have sometimes been called the .arts of learning and have to be studied with enough repetition and practice to produce in the learner facility in their use, i.e., mastery.

2. Bodies of knowledge that systematize basic facts and their relations. These disciplines give us a way of speaking and thinking about the world and everything in it; a way structured by the conceptual system that characterizes each discipline. To become adept in these functions, one must achieve knowledge of science, master its symbols and techniques, and think and

14 Published privately by the author, Urbana, Illlnols. Cf. also my BUILDING A PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION (2nd ed. rev.; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1961), chapter 13.


speak in its vocabulary. I know of no way to achieve this competence save by the systematic study of the basic sciences. With regard to curriculum we have to ask: How many of even the basic disciplines can be studied formally and systematically in Grades 7-127 Are some disciplines more basic than others? Can they be crystallized into sets of key concepts of big ideas, e.g., chemical bonds or gross national product? What progress 153 have we made in isolating and formulating these concepts for instruction at various levels of abstraction? 15

3. Bodies of knowledge that organize information along the routes of cultural development. History, biography, and evolutionary studies serve this purpose by giving some kind of order to the past. They furnish perspective, orientation, and even explanation of a sort. Educationally, this type of developmental study is important because it differs from the structural study both in content and in function. Statements about the development of chemistry as a social product are not necessarily part of the discipline .called chemistry, although without some knowledge of chemistry, its history and development are reduced pretty much to biography of chemists. This establishes the pedagogical priority of the study of .chemistry as .chemistry, but it does not establish its priority in importance as a part of com- mort general education. Developmental study may be very important for this kind of education and much less so for technological training.

Given the complexity and immensity of knowledge, one is forced to ask: Could a carefully designed set of developmental studies of the culture distributed over Grades 7-12 give the student an evolutionary account of the culture? Can we devise maps that are accurate, that can be studied systematically and with rigor, and yet which leave out the complexity of detail that distinguishes the professional study in a given field? Could such a set of studies unify and perhaps displace the assortment of courses in history, surveys in civilization, civics, and the like and at the same time include materials from sociology, anthro- pology, and other disciplines that now do not have a place in the high school curriculum?

4. Bodies of knowledge that project future problems and attempt to regulate the activities of the social order. Tykociner

15Some progress seems to have been made in this direction by the new curriculum research into mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In biology there is far less agreement on basic concepts and economists, I am told, are just beginning to seek agreement on them.


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cites agriculture, medieine, technology, and national defense as examples of the former, and political scienee, jurisprudence, economics, and management as examples of the tatter. We have a!so developed sciences to guide the dissemination of knowledge, e.g., education, mass communication, journalism, library science, custodianship of records and relics.

One may also mention here what Tykociner called "zetetics," the scienee of research, or better, the sciences that sustain and promote research. Now no one would argue that all of these studies be included in common secondary education, but knowledge about their function and interrelations within the social order is certainly part of what a high school graduate can be expected to have.

Educationally, if one asks how a proper understanding and appreciation of this type .of knowledge is best acquired, one is tempted to piek the thematic or problems approaeh. Perhaps a set of current social problems can be selected that not only give pra.etiee in the cognitive gambits of molar problem solving, but enlinghten the student about what diverse knowledges are relevant to great soeial issues and how that knowledge operates or fails to operate in their solution.

5. Finally, there are integrative and inspirational disciplines which create syntheses or value schema in the form of philosophies, theologies, and works of art. Surely common edueation cannot dispense with these, yet the most economical approaeh here might be the exemplar approach: a careful study of a small number of examples of great books, great works of art, and systems of ideas. This differs considerably from the structural, developmental, and the thematie approaches.

Whether this classification is eorrect is less important at the moment than that it exhibits the enormous range and complexity of human knowledge. It shows the futility of trying to find an adequate sample of it that can be studied structurally as separate subjects in Grades 7-12. A decision has to be made on how much knowledge about and how much knowledge of shall be required and how it shall be organized for instruction. The problem of designing the curriculum for common education is largely a matter of making up a formula that combines certain contents organized to achieve diverse school outcomes by diverse modes of teaching.

Although one may think of a number of different ways in which the extension of common education through Grades %12 can be achieved, one might hope that it would have the follow-


ing features and consequences: 1. It would provide levels of abstraction so that pupils

of varying scholastic aptitude could profitably study the program for six years.

2. That it would really complete the general education of the student, or at least complete it to the point that colleges need not utilize so much of their first two years to offer intro- I$5 ductory courses in the basic studies.

8. That it would permit the student to shorten his aca- demic preparation for a job or profession by aocomplishing in Grades 7-12 most of what is now ,being done in Grades 7-14. 16

While the establishment of such a common curriculum is theoretically compatible with electives in all sorts of activities, in my own thinking the more radical alternative of abolishing all vocational and elective work in the high school is, in the long view, the more advisable one, although I shall not take the space to give my reasons for this preference.

Given these features, this kind of program, worked out in detail by teams of educational philosophers, curriculum specialists, and administrators, might take advantage of certain movements and ferments already in progress to effect the kind of bloodless revolution that would anticipate the needs of the kind of society into which willy-nilly we have stumbled.

.One very important consideration needs to be noted. Al- though the new social order seems to prescribe a high level of formal schooling for the good life, large numbers of our people seem to get along quite comfortably with relatively little schooling. Indeed, many of our young people are impatient to leave school and argue that school is of little help to them in acquiring the kind of life they regard as good.

This factor cannot be ignored, nor can it be dismissed as a lack of awareness of real need by the people concerned. If the objection is valid, it does give a hollow sound to the high- sounding calls for more and more formal schooling for more and more of our people.

One of the paradoxes spawned by our industrial development is that mass production, by producing more and more automatic devices, reduces the amount o knowledge and skill needed to use each device. A good automobile is one that an

16 In BUILDING A PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, 2nd ed., OP. CIT., I have argued that this type of secondary school could do for all American youth What the European schools do for the elite. Here I cannot discuss the numerous questions that can properly be raised with respect to such a suggestion.


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operator needs to know little about. Although modern life is complicated, one can learn how to cope with it by an imitative trial and error. How to use public means of conveyance and communication; where and how to purchase things, and a thou- sand and one other complications of modern urban life are mastered by milieu learning; little formal schooling is needed.

Likewise, although it has been argued that automation will necessitate large numbers of trained personnel within the labor force, it is not inconceivable that by splitting up jobs that now require a fairly high order of formal training, the amount of such training will be so reduced that it can be learned by apprenticeship or in relatively short periods of guided practice. In any event, there seems to be no foreseeable future when a substantial proportion of our population cannot get by quite well with relatively little effort of body, mind, or will. For to survive, the system must subsidize consumption, and we can expect that large numbers of people will take advantage of this necessity, so that the law of least effort will operate.

This means that a life that is good enough by all historical standards can be achieved with far fewer than 12 years of formal schooling by a large number of our people, provided our intellectual and other elites keep their noses to the grind- stones. The evidence of history is that, aside from intermittent moods of cynicism and discouragement, men of talent will continue to drive themselves despite the admonitions of common sense, proverbial wisdom, and their physicians.

Against this low level of aspiration I can think of two arguments: one is to promise people that they will be happier ff they opt for the more strenuous life of self-cultivation and perfection, and the other is that in a race for survival the nation with the larger proportion of indolent eitizens will be destroyed. Neither argument, I confess, is very convincing to the indolent. To the first they can answer that they are happy enough as it is, and that "eager beavers" are not good insurance risks. To the second threat they could answer that they have heard some- w h e r e - probably on television when no other program was a v a i l a b l e - that one nation can no longer destroy another, because in modern war all nations will be destroyed.

To such retorts I have no simple answer, and I am not sure that to adolescents one needs to make one. We might let events give an answer. Suppose, for example, that our social order develops in such a way as to make the life of effortless consumption less satisfactory than it now seems. Suppose, for


example, that science and technology bestow large enough amounts of leisure and a long enough life span to the common man so as to make self-cultivation about the only tolerable alternative to distraction or boredom. Who is to say that the motivation for the new era of self-development does not lie dormant in the very situation that now discounts the need for such development?

These are, to be sure, speculative questions, but ff professional educators are to make a bid for leadership, these questions are for them to speculate about. Education, like scier~ce and industry, also needs a front line well ahead of current operation and exploitation. The shape of things to come defines the shape of life to come and this, in turn, of the education that ought to come.

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IV

S u m m a r y

a n d

c o n c l u s i o n

This essay began with the question as to why in the post- Sputnik crisis the leadership of the American secondary school passed from the hands of professional schoolmen to laymen. I have suggested that the cause was not the lack of technical skill nor a lack of purpose, but rather a failure to understand fully the dynamics of a modern large-scale machine industrial society. More particularly, I suggested that our dominant educational theorists did not fully appreciate the changes in the intellectual requirements for citizenship ia such a society, especially ff it retained its commitment to democracy.

The alternatives to tyranny by experts or mindless nose counting in such a society is political education for the masses. Such education requires certain kinds of knowledge, learning skills, and skills of deliberation and imagination. Furthermore, the new requirements for vocational preparation and self-development also point to the same sort of education, viz., a common education made up of general studies organized in such a way as to provide for the deliberate cultivation of the outcomes mentioned above.

This curriculum would differ in important ways from both the traditional college preparatory program and the life adjustment program. Some reasons were given and discussed as to why


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the extension of the common school from Grades 7-1~ was both necessary and feasible. Finally, it was brought out that modern society gives us important options as to the level of aspiration.

Although at this moment it is difllcult to answer the con- tentions of those whose aspirations do not exceed the life of effortless comfort which mass production provides, the same system may in time put a premium on a higher level of aspiration and self-cultivation. The exploration of such social possi- bilities constitutes the advance frontier of educational leadership.

The morals of this essay for philosophers of education are several. First, the kind of understandings urged here constitute a part of what philosophers of education "do" and what all students of education ought to study. Second, this essay may suggest a "service" function for philosophers of education, viz., as purveyors of conceptual competences needed by curriculum designers and even curriculum researchers. Taken together, shap- ing the categories of educational personnel in the classroom and membership on curriculum teams may give even the educational philosopher a part in hhe profession's bid to regain leadership.

T H E S E P A R A T I O N O F

P H I L O S O P H Y F R O M

T H E O R Y O F E D U C A T I O N

E L I Z A B E T H S T E I N E R M A C C I A

The O h i o State U n i v e r s i t y

I

T h e p r o b l e m s t a t e d

If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamenta l dispositions, intellectual and emotiona], toward na tu re and fellow men, phi losophy may even be defined as the general theory of education. 1

We may be willing to conceive education as Dewey did, yet we may be unwilling to define 'philosophy' as the theory of such

i John Dewey, DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION (New York: MacmilJan Co., 1916), p. 383.

to regain educational leadership

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