Page 81 - The Drucker Lectures

62 [ The Drucker Lectures

become completely triumphant in the last 30 years—may be
intellectually much richer, much freer, much more reward-
ing. But it is no community and it has no community. The
students of 1870 complained bitterly about the thin gruel that
was offered to them as intellectual nourishment and about
the stifling bigotry under which they had to live. But not one
of them felt “alienated.” Not one of them felt without a home,
without roots, without family. In fact, they felt far too much
“restrained” by a college that, in effect, considered itself the
father and mother of the student. American education to-
morrow will have to think through who its constituents are.
It will have to learn to establish relations with them. It will
have to learn, above all, to get across to them what each con-
stituency can and should expect from the school and what the
school can and should expect from each constituency.
6. One way or another, American education today will be held
accountable for performance. I do not know how one mea-
sures “performance” in education. The reason why I do not
know this is that one first has to know what the objectives
and goals are before one knows what one should measure.
If you tell me that the first job, let us say, of an elementary
school is to have the children learn to read, I can measure
performance, and very easily. If you then, however, add that
you want to socialize children—that is, to make civilized hu-
man beings out of them; if you then talk of the development
of the whole person; and if you add on to this preparation
for employment and making a living, you make it impossible
for anyone to measure. In other words, the school will be
expected to think through objectives and goals, to get them
accepted, and then to hold itself accountable for them. If the
school does not take on this responsibility, standards of mea-
surement will be imposed from the outside. The educators
will then protest violently that these are the wrong standards