Public Educ

More education takes place OUTSIDE the classroom than within it. Through not novel, this nonetheless engaging thesis is central to Lawrence Cremin's Public Education, a slim volume examining compelling educative forces exerting an impact on children.Cremin, whose earlier The Transformation of the School ranks as perhaps the most popular analysis of John Dewey's theories, unsurprisingly leans heavily on his mentor in a jargon-free treatise based on a 1975 lecture to the John Dewey Society. Like the educational reformer, Cremin argues for recognition within the classroom of outside-the-school forces playing a significant role in both lower and higher education.Identifying himself as well with provocative contemporary educationists, principally John Holt and Paul Goodman, Cremin argues that American education anesthetizes a student to learning by negating the value of the individual's background, experience, and environment. Holt's How Children Fail and Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, two passionate calls for reform, decry teachers unwilling to relate classroom lessons to life outside the school's walls. Cremin now adds his book to those demanding loud reaffirmation of John Dewey's concept of the wholeness of learning.The author thoughtfully questions, for example, those teachers ignoring the revolutionary influences of film, TV, radio, and other forms of mass communication. He explains the extensiveness of still other resources and influences--termed "configurations of education"--including libraries, museums, politics, neighborhoods, urban centers, factories, technology, and contemporary lifestyles.A child brings to the classroom an experiential background and an aggregation of values, attitudes, and relationships formed by the family. To recognize--and subsequently draw from--these other-than-school forces molding a child's world view is to begin reconciling a continuing dichotomy between what occurs in the classroom and what occurs beyond its walls.All society is a limitless resource made up of potent educational configurations. In the developing child, daily learning happens more effectively and persuasively outside of the often restricting structure of the school. Needed, Cremin says, is a definition of growing up and indeed of institutional education itself, a definition that should not exclude these real and latent configurations.Echoing the critical theories of American philosopher George Santayana, the book lucidly addresses the conflict between idealism and materialism in the United States. On the one hand is the school idealizing and mythologizing American reality. On the other hand are those beyond-the-school truths of the American experience, un-romanticized truths, which teach and form young people to become, typically, what they do become. To bring the two separate strains together in a more practical totality is to integrate the configurations, to integrate all of society's educative forces.Since a child enters the school with the enti