Page 79 - The Drucker Lectures

60 [ The Drucker Lectures

teacher’s convenience had to be imposed on the entire class,
thus making impossible the utilization of the student’s own
endowment, temperament, characteristics, and abilities. And
this we will not permit ourselves any more in the American
education of tomorrow. There we will try to the maximum
extent possible to utilize the way each child learns best as the
way each child learns.
3. American education tomorrow will, at the same time, be
achievement-oriented. It will, in effect, demand of itself that
it enable each student to acquire excellence in the area for
which his own talents and abilities fit him best. This is not
doing away with the core skills, whatever they may be. But
it is accepting the fact that this is a big and diverse world in
which a great many different skills and different talents and
different tasks can find useful and productive employment.
It is accepting the fact that, thank God, human beings are
not alike; each of us has areas of strengths as well as areas
of weaknesses. Today’s school, in effect, is still the school of
the scribes. To be sure, we have added art appreciation and
physical education and shop and home economics. But we are
really rather contemptuous of everything that is not reading,
writing, or arithmetic. Today’s school imposes a value system
on the human being, which, in effect, eliminates something
like three-quarters of human gifts as “irrelevant.” This is not
only inhuman in the most literal sense of the word. It is not
only stupid. It is also incompatible with the realities of our
economy and our society. We need people who are crafts-
men in thousands of areas. We will expect the school to be
achievement oriented. We will expect it to try to find the real
strengths of the students, to challenge them, and to make
them productive.
4. In its methods the school of tomorrow will be neither “be-
haviorist” nor “cognitive,” neither “child-centered” nor “dis-