Public Schools: How Parents Feel

The U.S. public is "far ahead of present-day educators" in willingness to accept innovation in schools, says Pollster George Gallup in a new survey of parental opinion. If parents had their way, all classrooms would already be using teaching machines and programmed textbooks for "fact" learning, team teachers would be focusing on the great, neglected field of training kids in how to think and analyze, children would progress by ability groups rather than grades, advanced students would spend nearly half of their time studying alone. And school administrators would be hotly devising even newer methods of instruction.

Openness & Objection. The opinion survey, most thorough probing ever done of public attitudes toward the schools, was made for the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, which has just launched an Institute for Development of Educational Activities (IDEA) with a $1,200,000 grant aimed at getting ideas out of research libraries and into classrooms. Eighteen California school districts have agreed to try out innovations to be suggested by IDEA'S Dr. John Goodlad, who heads the University Elementary School operated by the University of California at Los Angeles.

For all their openness to new ideas, parents have some firm objections to a few proposals that are being talked about. They reject a longer school day to reduce homework, summer vacations shortened to four weeks, standard tests in all U.S. high schools, and use of "pass" or "fail" grading.

"To Figure Things Out." Asked to rate 48 possible goals of education, parents particularly prize the development of such personal qualities as honesty, respect for authority, and respect for other races and religions. Also near the top are the "desire to keep on learning throughout life" and such mental skills as "the ability to figure things out for oneself" and "to concentrate." But mathematics beyond simple arithmetic rates near the bottom of the list, presumably because few adults require such skills in their own lives. Similarly, at the very bottom of the rankings is the ability to speak a foreign language. Surprisingly low rankings go to such goals as willingness to participate in civic projects and—even below appreciation of good food—appreciation of good music and drama.

Despite their desire for changes in the schools, 75% of the parents feel today's schools are better than those of their own school days. And they readily concede that the schools cannot do the job alone. They rate their own responsibility higher than that of the schools for achieving at least half of the 48 suggested goals.