School syndrome: Understanding the USA’s magical belief that schooling can somehow improve society, promote access, and preserve advantage

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: The USA is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence on having things both ways through the magical medium of education. We want schools to express our highest ideals as a society and our greatest aspirations as individuals, but only as long as they remain ineffective in actually realizing them, since we do not really want to acknowledge the way these two aims are at odds with each other. We ask schools to promote equality while preserving privilege, so we perpetuate a system that is too busy balancing opposites to promote student learning. We focus on making the system inclusive at one level and exclusive at the next, in order to make sure that it meets demands for both access and advantage. As a result the system continues to lure us to pursue the dream of fixing society by reforming schools, while continually frustrating our ability to meet these goals. And we cannot find a simple cure for this syndrome because we will not accept any remedy that would mean giving up one of our aims for education in favor of another.

Type of resource	text
Date created	[ca. 2011]

Author	Labaree, David F.

Subject	school reform
Subject	history of education
Subject	educational markets
Subject	educational policy
Subject	Graduate School of Education
Genre	Article

Related Publication	Labaree, David F. (2012). School syndrome: Understanding the USA’s magical belief that schooling can somehow improve society, promote access, and preserve advantage. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44:2, 143-163.
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/th281rf3887

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Preferred Citation: Labaree, David F. (2012). School syndrome: Understanding the USA’s magical belief that schooling can somehow improve society, promote access, and preserve advantage. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44:2, 143-163.

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