I wanted to do a program about schools. After all, we've all got thoughts about what our kids need. But how should the discussion be framed? What's a good issue that will get us into the guts of our concerns? What's a good question that people who are not professionals in the field can feel equipped to address? It wasn't clear to me, so I went around posing that very questions to my friends. No single issue raised by any of them led me to shout "Stop the Presses!", so that's the question I want to pose to our listeners: "IF SCHOOLS ARE THE SUBJECT WE'RE DISCUSSING, WHAT'S THE QUESTION WE SHOULD BE ASKING?" In other words, "WHAT'S THE MAIN ISSUE THAT CONCERNS YOU ABOUT OUR SCHOOLS?" To help prime the pump, here are some preliminary thoughts. Some people worry about the issue of safety: they don't want their kids getting beat up --or perhaps even shot-- at school. That's certainly an important concern --in some places more than others-- but it is not mostly an educational issue. If the schools' discipline problems have escalated from gum-chewing to armed assault, the problem seems not so much one of schooling as of some more general social deterioration washing up on the shores of the schools. Myself, I'm more interested in what our schools should be teaching out kids, and how they should be teaching it. Some are concerned with the long-term decline in SAT scores. Why aren't our kids learning more? Thirty years ago, we thought each generation would be smarter than the one before, but it doesn't seem to have worked out that way. American schools were supposed to be the best in the world, but international comparisons these days are hardly a source of national pride for America. Here, too, it's hard to know how much the schools are the recipients of problems flowing from the larger society, and how much the schools themselves are the source. What are parents teaching their kids about an ethic of work and achievement? How well are they regulating their children's use of television and video games, not to mention other addictive materials? Sometimes it's easier to blame our institutions for problems whose roots lie closer to home. When we think about the matter of motivation, the question arises: how conducive is American society today to children's growing up with a sense of purpose? But then there's also the schools' part of the picture: how well do our schools help chidlren to discover and cultivate such a purpose, and how well does the work the schools give our children connect with the goals they may develop? Why don't we do a better job in nurturing a love of learning? It's my impression that young children are naturally curious. Why do so many of our insatiably inquiring two-year-olds become the apathetic, bored adolescents we see in so many high school classrooms? What are the parents or the schools doing to stifle the exuberant exploratory drives of the young human? But I think that there's more to education than its intellectual aspects. Beyond SAT scores, even beyond the deeper intellectual dimension of originality of thought, there is the question of what kind of human being one's child grows up to be. What role should the school play in shaping that outcome? A minister friend of mine told me that all he wanted the schools to teach was the 3Rs, not values and character. His kids get that at home, he says. But I don't agree. For one thing, the same argument could apply to academics-- for we parents, for better or worse, also teach our kids a good deal about how to think and what to think about. For another, even if we are doing a fine job of teaching our kids about such things as character, we've also got to live in a world with a lot of other people's kids, and not all those parents are giving their children the solid moral foundation my friend is giving his. But beyond that, I think that "value-free" education is not morally neutral. Rather it sends an implicit, but powerful and morally corrosive message. It says that as a society we mandate the development of technical values --knowledge, skills, expertise-- but are willing to leave other kinds of value off the agenda. It helps foster the dangerous notion --whose ramifications are everywhere apparent-- that its OK to separate the realm of one's work from the realm of one's moral and spiritual commitments. But the question of how we should deal with matters like values, with sex education and character development, in the public schools of a culturally diverse society is a question as difficult as it is important. Should the values of the majority be imposed on the children of a minority? Should moral teachings be reduced to some kind of common denominator? How prepared are parents to have their children exposed to ideas different from theirs? How good do parents want the schools to be? I think it matters a very great deal what kind of people my children spend their time with. But I notice that, although school teachers are better paid than day-care workers, our society does not apportion its financial rewards so as to attract many of the best possible people into the field. If we care as much about our children as we Americans tell ourselves we do, why don't we reward the very best teachers according to their value, in line, say, with what good doctors and lawyers make? Do we think they're worth less? Does the problem lie in our institutional structures or in our values? If schooling became more of a competitive system --allowing parents and children to make choices through vouchers, or whatever-- would the best educators be rewarded? Or would we end up with massive enrollment in the educational equivalent of fast-food and prime time TV? What do we really want?