"It is your job," a primary school principal said to a visiting mother one day, "to feed and clothe him; we shall educate him."

It is very doubtful that this principal--head of one of the best schools in educationally-praised Westchester County, N.Y., really believed in this dichotomy of upbringing; certainly in her own school, which, many parents believed, was run by the PTA, she did not practice it. But her remark indicates a separatist view of the parent-school relationship which many educators, in their quiet, undisturbed hours, visualize as an ideal one: the school free from parental interference, at liberty to introduce the subjects it wishes and the textbooks it chooses, without the twitching nose of the community pressing against the window pane. It is this way with the best private universities; wouldn't it be delightful if it could be so with secondary schools?

A "Life-centered" Approach

No, unfortunately. For the inadequacies of present-day education, where uninspired, underpaid teachers and administrators are willing to go along with any convenient, easy, well-tried program, demand that some sort of watchdog eye be placed on the schools, to insure that the best possible education can be achieved. Education in this part of the twentieth century has become an all-out community affair, with the isolationism of the academic school of the nineteenth century gone forever. The new--as one authors calls the "life-centered"--approach to education demands the interaction of the student with the community, effected through school field trips and parental visits and interest in the school. In community, after community, parents have had to take a stand where schools themselves have failed to provide some facet of educational experience that the intelligent portion of a locality strongly felt was worthwhile.

Can Cause Weakness

Obviously, this interdependence has many weaknesses, and many hazards. If the community is a relatively poor one, a halt-leading-the-blind relationship may occur, with mistake following ludicrous mistake down the trail of ignominy. In Cambridge, for example, the School Committee, the elected body of parents responsible for supervising the schools, tried to "improve" its school facilities by making a series of unnecessary appointments and promoting unqualified men to responsible jobs in the school system. In this case, the irresponsible action of one group of parents was rectified by another group of parents, who organized petitions and referenda and court actions, until finally the action was overruled.

In Virgina, parents have set out to improve the school systems, on the verge of adulteration by the Supreme Court, by urging upon the state legislatures bills abolishing integrated public schools. This fall, these parents will sit placidly by while all the public schools in the state become private and, until some sort of reverse legislation takes place, their children will remain at home, unschooled.

Other Example Shown

These are, of course, extreme examples. But this interdependence easily fosters such unhappy incidents, and a constant vigil on the part of both school authorities and the intelligent portion of the parental community is necessary to keep public education on a sane and salutary keel. Parents in Syosset, New York, an idyllic little community on Long Island, discovered that the glee club director of one school was teaching his singers patriotic songs of the United States, England, France, and Russia--the last a song written nine years before by a Soviet composer. They accused him of being unpatrioic, and it took an investigation by the school board and an admission of "an error in judgment" by the director to clear the air once more.

Newton H. S.

At the opposite extreme is the school system in Newton, reorganized across the nation as a superior educational plant. Here, the school board is composed of representative figures in education, industry, finance, and domesticity who argue disputes at an intellectual level, and are interested solely in the welfare of the school system. They are possessed of an implicit trust in the professional staffs of the schools, and to a great extent rely on them for suggestions for improving the curriculum. Detailed proposals made to the board by a member of a faculty have been rejected only because of financial limitations, when the School Committee would greet the proposal with a wistful no.

An interesting comparison presents itself between the Newton and the Cambridge School Committees. The Newton board is composed of specimens of the highest intelligence in the city; the Cambridge board--with a few notable exceptions is representative of the less intelligent portion of the city. Both these groups are quasi-cliques; but the Newton committee has the full support of the community while the Cambridge board generally manages to create a rift with each important move it makes: the educated, PTA-supporting citizens on one side; the less well educated, anti-PTA citizens on the other.

Method at Newton

In an explanation of this difference lies another facet of parent-school interdependence. The Newton board takes great care to send out to all parents in the community extensive reports of each of its meetings, and encourages parents to talk with teachers, principals, board members, and the Superintendent. "Anybody in this city can walk in the door and speak his peace," Harold Gores, Newton Superintendent of Schools, maintains. This encouraging of intimate, individual parent-school contact prevents a community from looking upon the school committee as a power structure that must be beaten down in order to have one's say. In Cambridge, where so much of the recent appointments scandal was carried on in "executive session," from which visitors were barred, such a structure has been built up, at least in the minds of the citizenry. To succeed in running an effective school system, then, the school board must unite the community behind it, and in so doing it will absorb and affect the ideas of the citizens who feel that they have a significant role to play in the education of their own children. This is being done--though far too infrequently--by the means of these reports, and by the appointing of citizens' committees, groups of adults in the community who possess a special interest or knowledge in a problem to be tackled by the school system, whether it be construction of a new building or preparing of a new course of study.

Two Examples at Westchester