Page 76 - The Drucker Lectures

7

What We Already Know about

American Education Tomorrow

1971

e all know that the American school is in crisis today. In
Wfact, there are people around who talk about “de-school-
ing America” and who prophesy a future in which there will be
no school at all. This, bluntly, is not going to happen. But there
certainly is ahead of us a long period of turbulence and crisis, of
rethinking of fundamentals, and of building school systems that
will look very different from any we have seen so far.
It is, therefore, important, I submit, to realize that we under-
stand the problem—despite all the rhetoric and emotion around
it. We know why the school is in crisis. We already know what
American education tomorrow might, or at least should, look
like. And we can at least guess at where the new methods and
concepts are first going to become practice and accomplishment.
The first thing to say—and it cannot be said too often—is
that the school is not in crisis because it is doing worse all of
a sudden. The school is in crisis because its role for individual
and society has changed so greatly, because it is so much more
important than it ever used to be.
The entire school system, in every country, has been based
on the assumption that “learning” is an intellectual activity.
“Learning,” the schools assume, is done in and by a separate

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