School choice

“ The foundation of a good life begins with a great education. Today, too many of our children are stuck in schools that do not provide this opportunity.
Because the education of our young people is so important, the parents of every student in America should have a right to a meaningful choice about where their child goes to school. ”

“ Communities that provide academic options — traditional public, public charter, private, magnet, parochial, virtual, and homeschooling — empower parents and guardians to select the best educational fit for their children.
School choice helps alleviate common hindrances to success and creates the space necessary for students’ aspirations to flourish. Families that participate in school choice programs are not the only ones who benefit from expanded educational options. Children in traditional public schools benefit as well. ”

“ Our country is home to many great schools and many extraordinary teachers—whether they serve in traditional public schools, public charter schools, magnet schools, private or religious schools, or in homeschooling environments. ”

“ The struggle should be perpetual and in the right direction. First, elevate your common schools so that the education there may be a sufficient basis for a course of training here. If the Normal School and the public schools shall each and all do their duty, candidates for admission will be so well qualified in the branches required, that the art of teaching will be the only art taught here. ”

“ In short, it means that the school-system should be adapted to the boy and not the boy to the system, and, further, that education authorities should regard it as part of their function to guide into proper channels the special abilities which the teachers have reared. ”

“ Without question, the curricula of the public school should be modified so as to meet the needs of all the boys in the community and vocational and industrial training should have larger place in our educational plans. The boy who is to earn his livelihood by his hands and head should receive as much attention and intelligent instruction as the boy who aims at a professional career. However, with all its limitations, the public school is the only institution which has a definite policy in the education of the boy. ”

“ Parents and children would regulate the course of study according to their own crude notions; and, instead of having institutions which agree in carrying on a similar course of study, each school would have its own peculiar system, and compete and conflict with every other. Meantime, the public would have no means of deciding which was best, nor any opportunity for learning when a professional man was properly qualified for his duties. ”

“ By sending better teachers into the public schools, you will effectually aid in the removal of this difficulty. The Normal School is, then, no substitute for the high school, academy, or college. Nor do we ask for any sympathy or aid which properly belongs to those institutions. ”

“ The end for which a school system exists is the instruction of the children, attaching to the word instruction the meaning it attains in the mind of a well-educated person, if not in the mind of an educational expert.
To secure this end, no plan of organization alone will suffice. Nothing can take the place of a sincere desire for good schools, of a fair knowledge of what good schools are, and what will make them, of a public spirit and a moral sense on the part of the people, which are spontaneous, or which can be appealed to with confidence. ”

“ The change from the old to the new lines of education is even more marked in the common schools than in the colleges and universities. The practical begins in the free kindergarten and runs with more or less directness through all the grades. Millions are expended upon industrial training. The business high schools are a great feature of the free school system. ”

“ To help such children succeed in school, meet the State academic standards that all children are expected to meet, and graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education and the workforce without the need for remediation. ”

“ The academy and college take young men from the district and high schools, and furnish them with additional aids for the business of life; but the Normal School is truly the helper of the common schools. It receives its pupils from them, fits these pupils for teachers, and sends them back to superintend where a few months before they were scholars. ”

“ The fact is that the ordinary secondary school is attempting—unsuccessfully, of course—to give the same treatment to pupils of various types who, owing to lack of sufficiently varied provision for higher education, now find themselves herded together. ”

“ It is my own conviction that a higher order of teaching talent is required in the primary school, or for the early, judicious education of children, than is required in any other institutions of learning. Nor can it be shown that equal ability for government is not essential. ”

“ The great public school system, all colleges and universities—the entire educational system, high and low—is society's most spectacular attempt to prepare youth to meet the problems of life. However, the collective influence of these institutions is but one factor among many. ”

“ The establishment of modern and efficient schools is alone not sufficient for the intellectual needs of the coming time. The school and university are merely the preparation for the life of mental activity in which the citizen of the coming state will live. ”

“ The school, like every other form of education, develops; and as it grows, it constantly changes its content, which again is nothing else than the content that the spirit gives to itself at every moment of its concrete development.
It would be just as irrational to expect a school to map out with precision the limits and the scope of a pupil’s culture. ”

“ The school, being democratic and dependent upon the general public for existence, takes its cue therefrom, and creating ideals in consonance with public needs perfects the method of reaching them. When father and mother believe in a vigorous, efficient education, rooted deeply in the child's fundamental attitude toward the world and its affairs, then will the public approve and urge the proper kind of organized training. ”

“ But look carefully through any large school and many a small one, and you will find children who would gladly partake of this free education but who for many reasons, and through no fault of their own, are unable to do so. Children who sit idly in school or stumble blindly through a grade or two, and children whose names are finally taken from the register because for them no place in school can be made. ”

“ The public school has the power, and should exercise it, to bring within its walls all the children physically and mentally competent to attend it. If children are under intelligent observation, departures from the normal can in many instances be recognized in time for training and education according to the particular need. ”

“ It should be our purpose to construct, not to destroy. The school, this glorious inheritance of human experiences, this ever-glowing hearth where the human spirit kindles and sublimates life as an object of constant criticism and of undying love, may be transformed, but cannot be destroyed. Let the school live, and let us cling to the teacher and maintain his authority, which limits the spontaneity and the liberty of the pupil. ”

“ The school system and its relations to local authorities, on the one hand, and to the general government, on the other, form a vast and difficult subject involving not merely pedagogical principles, but also such aims as the maintenance of higher learning, the dissemination of useful information, and the practice of indispensable arts. In university lectures a few words on such topics suffice, since young men who accept a school position assume, at the same time, obligations which for a long time to come prescribe for them the path they must follow. ”

“ But is it not possible to have schools in which every subject taught shall be made interesting to the scholars, in which the ways of knowledge shall become the ways of pleasantness, in which there shall be sufficient variety in the program of lessons to keep the minds of the pupils constantly fresh and vigorous, in which the pupils shall not be rewarded by being dismissed at an earlier hour than usual from the school, but in which possibly they shall consider it reward to be allowed to remain longer than usual? ”

“ If we adopt this course, then it must be the duty of the school authorities of the various districts to see that Evening Schools of various types suited to the needs of the various classes of students are duly provided, and that no insurmountable obstacles are placed in the way of those desirous and anxious to take advantage of the means of higher education. ”

“ In these vital tasks of acquiring a broader view of human possibilities the common school must have a large part. I urge that teachers and other school officers increase materially the time and attention devoted to instruction bearing directly on the problems of community and national life.—Woodrow Wilson. ”

“ In a word, the chief consideration to which all others are to be subordinated, in the opinion of your committee, is this requirement of the civilization into which the child is born as determining what he shall study in school.” There is the old idea of study, in which, from the adult standpoint, we decide that what the child will use as a man shall constitute his course. We have had the three R’s and 136 we have tended to kill the children. The new education is based on child study, apperception, and interest. ”

“ If we grant the economic ability to support good schools, then the curriculum offered by any type of school, the scope of subject-matter given the pupils to master, is a measure of the educational ideals of those maintaining and using the schools. If the curriculum is broad, and representative of the various great fields of human culture; if it relates itself to the life and needs of its patrons; if it is adapted to the interests and activities of its pupils, it may be said that the people believe in education as a right of the individual and as a preparation for successful living. ”

“ If we were to conceive our educational end and aim in a less exclusive way, if we were to introduce into educational processes the activities which appeal to those whose dominant interest is to do and to make, we should find the hold of the school upon its members to be more vital, more prolonged, containing more of culture.
But why should I make this labored presentation? The obvious fact is that our social life has undergone a thorough and radical change. If our education is to have any meaning for life, it must pass through an equally complete transformation. ”

“ It must obviously make a vast difference whether pupils look forward to the university, or whether the gymnasium is filled with boys who do not intend to pursue higher studies; whether a burgher school sets a final examination to mark the stage of general culture to which the school is expected to advance the pupils, or whether the pupils enter and leave without well-defined reasons according to what seems best to their respective families ”

“ It will not necessarily happen that public schools will furnish to every child and youth the desired amount of education. Professional schools, classical schools, and academies of various grades, will be continued; but there is an amount of intellectual and moral training needed by every child which can be best given in the public school. This training in the public schools ought to be carried much further than it usually is. ”

“ We must also be content to see the high privilege of general education seized by boys and girls whose easy lives make them careless of its value and inconstant in its pursuit. These conditions schools themselves cannot change. But by public provision and by scholarships the opportunity for prolonged education may be kept open to the able and ambitious. The spirit of teaching and school administration may help to prevent the formation of social caste. ”

“ If we seek an aim, and are not blinded by academic pride, here is one right at hand. You will not be surprised to hear that the policy of the modern department of pedagogy is to help, not to exploit, the high school. The social point of view is capable, perhaps to a greater degree than one might at first expect, of modifying our procedure in dealing with the lower schools. ”

“ These desirable changes have not taken place in all schools by any means, but the results of their introduction have been so significant that a constantly increasing number of schools are adopting them; and public school education is to mean infinitely more in the future than it has in the past because we are seeing the necessity of looking at things through the eyes of the pupil, and especially from the standpoint of his life outside of and after leaving the school. ”

“ In a public school, therefore, when all classes of the community are to be taught, the truths and exercises should be selected in such a manner, that they shall, if possible, be equally useful to all; leaving the navigator and the agriculturist, the surgeon and the lawyer, to supplement their general education, by the study of those special branches of learning which their several professions require. ”

“ My idea would be to have all young people under twenty-one remain in a sense the wards of schools. If they have had, at any early age, to leave school and take the burdens of bread-winning upon their young shoulders and their untried hearts, then I would advise an extension of school authority. ”

“ What can be done in the way of introducing subject-matter in history and science and art, that shall have a positive value and real significance in the child's own life; that shall represent, even to the youngest children, something worthy of attainment in skill or knowledge; as much so to the little pupil as are the studies of the high-school or college student to him? You know what the traditional curriculum of the first few years is, even though many modifications have been made. ”