Articles Contained in SIRS Enduring Issues 2005.

Originally Published: Education Is Not a Luxury, March 2004; pp. 280-287.

"Even less than a hundred years ago, America was an agricultural society. Most people worked in farming or in finishing agricultural crops....This last century has seen an incredible transformation of our society into one that produces information and services. But one thing has not changed. Though we are no longer agrarian, the agrarian calendar continues to dominate one facet of American life--education. The school year still begins late in the summer and ends late in the spring. It accommodates farming. Eighty years ago it made as much sense as it did ten thousand years ago, when some of our ancestors gave up hunting and gathering because they had learned to cultivate crops and domesticate animals. For them, as for Americans eighty years ago, tending the crops was the most important thing. Schooling was a luxury, which could be carried on when the demands of the fields and the pastures were not pressing. But schooling--the long process of educating the young--is not in our world and time a luxury. We claim to believe this, to take it for granted. Yet we still maintain a school calendar that reflects life eighty years ago and maybe ten-thousand years ago." (WORLD & I) The author presents his ideas for improving the American education system, including lengthening the school year and the school day.

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