School and Family in the Postmodern World.

The schools have already undergone a major transformation - independent of any conscious reform agenda - simply in response to changes in the society and in the family, Mr. Elkind points out. The school is the mirror of society and of the family. As society and the family change, so too must the school. Over the past half century there has been a major structural change in how we think about, perceive, and value ourselves and our world. This change has transformed our arts and our sciences, our industries and commerce, and our families. It has been labeled the shift from modernity to postmodernity.[1] Of necessity the school has reflected these changes and is a far different institution today than it was at midcentury. This transformation of the school has come about not by a conscious pursuit of education reform, but rather as an adaptive response to the changes in the family and in the larger society. In what follows describe how the modern school reflected modern society and the nuclear family and how the postmodern school mirrors postmodern society and the permeable family.[2] However, before proceed with this discussion, we need to look first at the shift from modern to postmodern themes and then at how these themes are translated into modern and postmodern family ties. Only then can we appreciate how the modern school was a complement to the nuclear family and how the post-modern school is a mirror of the permeable family. must say as well that, while the postmodern perspective has already been extended to education, find most of these discussions quite abstract and removed from the practical issues of everyday pedagogy and child rearing. One of my aims in this article is to make concrete the post-modern as it applies to schools and families. Fundamental Beliefs Of Modernity It is not possible here to give anything like a complete account of the movement from modernism to postmodernism or of the debates that the use of these terms has engendered.[3] For our purposes, we can assume that the movement represents a fundamental paradigmatic shift in our abiding world view. In the broadest sense, modernity arose as a revolt against the autocracy of the pre-modern world. It eventually overturned the medieval forms of government, religion, science, art, and education. Modernity was a continuing revolution in the sense that it did not occur all at once. Nor was it restricted to one particular country or to one specific domain of society. Rationalism, humanism, democracy, individualism, and romanticism were all modern ideas that took root and flourished at different times and in different places. Moreover, modernism was largely a Western phenomenon, and even today one can still find non-Western societies that are more feudal than modern. Although modernity emerged at different times and in different places, it did have a single, unifying motif. It celebrated the individual as opposed to established authority. Rene Descartes is often credited with being among the first to express this faith in human thought with his assertion I think, therefore am. Descartes rooted authority not in objective agencies but in subjective thought and reasoning. The supremacy of reason, of the individual, and of individual freedom have been the abiding tenets of modernity. Protestantism in religion, self-expression in the arts, experimentation in science, and democracy in government all echo these modern themes. As modernity spread in Western society, it established three basic beliefs that were the foundation for our modern perception and understanding of the world. The first of these was the belief in the concept of social progress: the idea that society and the lot of individuals within that society are gradually improving. The vision of social progress was closely tied up with the belief in the growth of scientific knowledge and in its necessary benefits for mankind. With the modern focus on progress, the medieval idea of a fixed body of knowledge, provided by an authoritative text, was abandoned. …