Page 80 - The Drucker Lectures

What We Already Know about American Education Tomorrow [ 61

cipline-centered.” It will be eclectic. Indeed, it is increasingly
becoming clear that these old—very, very old—controversies
have been sham battles all along. To learn anything, we need
the behaviorist triad of practice-reinforcement-feedback.
Otherwise, whatever we try to learn will never get lodged
in the long memory and will never become learned. But to
do anything with teaming, we need purpose, decision, val-
ues, understanding—the “cognitive” categories. Otherwise,
“learning” is “behavior” rather than “information,” let alone
“knowledge.” It is “activity” rather than “action.” We also know
now that it is always the individual who learns; all learning is
“child-centered.” But it is also something that is being learned;
all learning is “discipline-centered.” The problem does not lie
in this dichotomy of old. It lies in what the right disciplines
are—that is, what school tries to accomplish. And it lies in
the sequencing of disciplines to satisfy both the learning pat-
tern of the learner and the learning logic of the subject matter.
Crawling comes before walking both in terms of bone and
muscle development and in terms of equilibrium mechanics.
5. To move to an entirely different area: Tomorrow’s school—
whether kindergarten, university or continuing education—
has to be integrated into the community and to be an inte-
grator of the community. A great deal can be said against
the small college of the mid-nineteenth century with its rigid
curriculum aimed essentially at training ministers in Latin,
Greek, Hebrew, and a little arithmetic; with its narrow reli-
gious blinkers; and with its authoritarian structure in which
all power rested in a president appointed, as a rule, from the
outside by a board dominated by a religious denomination.
But one thing can be said for it. It was part of its commu-
nity—whether the community was the Methodists or the
Baptists or the Congregationalists. The modern university,
which replaced it between 1860 and 1900—and which has