Episode 4

"Children may only be about 20 percent of the population, but they are 100 percent of the future." This episode focused on the educational system from the 1980's to the present. During this time, there was a push for standardized testing and educational reforms in order to make education more productive and successful for the business world. There was also a push for choices in school, as far as class go, which I think was a move in the right direction. President Bush vowed to "make America's schools the best in the world." This included vouchers to help students in low income areas attended private schools. Some of these vouchers included vouchers for religious schools, and this was highly controversial; it is hard to draw the line between separation of church and state. I think that this was a negative effort, because it took money away from funding public schools; that money could have been used to make the schools better rather than paying for public schools. The privatization of schools, while it seemed good at first, failed and the money was lost. During this time, the number of students being home schooled also rose dramatically, which I can relate to because that is what my sister chooses to do with her children for religious reasons. It was very interesting to listen to the part about the media giving equipment to the schools but they had to watch 12 minutes of channel 1 advertising. The piece about charter schools was very interesting, because the two Presidential candidates currently have very different views on these schools, and I never completely understood what they were; President Bill Clinton believed that competition would improve the school systems. Most of these charter schools were non-profit. Bill Clinton was also an enforcer of raising achievement levels through standardized testing in the areas of math and reading. I love the quote, "You can't teach a child to think in must you have something for him to think about."

PBS The Story of School Episode 1

During the history of the United States from the time of pre-revolutionary ideas to 1900, education was very different than what it is today. It is interesting to think that public education was basically a form of Sunday school, where many schools were closely linked to the Protestant Bible. By the time of the Revolutionary War, most Americans could read newspapers and the Bible, as well as figure their own taxes. However, education was very unequal; I found it appalling that girls only got the chance to go to school for three years! Along those lines, their was no education provided for slaves. Education was also limited among the poor and rural schools were dilapidated. The schools were focused around discipline, which connects to the education interviews that I conducted with my father and grandmother. When they went to public schools, discipline was a very important feature. I also thought that the piece on how teaching was seen as strictly a woman's profession was very intriguing; while there are still more female teachers today, I feel like male teachers have begun making a huge impact on this frontier. I liked the piece on how it was a woman's "moral responsibility" to teach. While many of the teaching techniques and what was in the textbooks seems ridiculous now, I understand the era and the culture of the time.

PBS Episode 3

In this episode of the PBS "School" series, it traced some of the reforms in the school systems that took place from 1950 to 1980. One of the things that I knew never was that the books that the African Americans were using were usually a couple of years behind; I had never realized that before. I also never realized that many African American teachers lost their jobs after integrating the schools. I was also really impressed with the views and stands that Lyndon Johnson took; I had never recognized him as the educational advocate that he was. He implemented the Bilingual Education Act, The Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Civil Rights Act. He also started Head Start and low cost college loans. Another section of this episode that was interesting to me was the piece on the Hispanics in the Southwest; their struggles is an area of the civil rights struggle that I had never really learned about. I really liked the part about the School Board being voted out and four new Hispanic members being voted in and the School Board meetings on Monday nights being "better than football."

PBS The Story of School

I thought that the episode was really interesting in the way that it described how schools responded to the flood of immigrants that came to the United States during the early 1900s. One of the ways that this occurred was in the banning of child laborers, taught vocational skills that would be useful for factory jobs, and focusing on teaching them the English language. I thought that it was really interesting in the way that the teachers tried to "Americanize" these children, trying to teach them American holidays and the American way of life. One of the things that was different was how they tried to increase health and hygiene in the students, including introducing swimming pools in order to help bath the students; along those same lines, teachers tried to teach behavior by have afternoon tea. I liked the fact that the schools opened up at night in order to help reach the community as well; this shows that the school system and community leaders cared about the entire well-being of the community.
The piece about the Life Adjustment Education was a riot; to think that young students were actually educated on things such as when to kiss and how late to stay out is baffling. I can only imagine what I would have thought as a young student sitting through one of those movies.
Along these same lines, it is sad that the immigrant school systems quickly became discriminatory and tracked by nationality and race. The piece about the IQ testing was extremely shocking: the tests were extremely subjective, and caused students to be tracked into lower levels without having any say in the matter.