The New ‘New Education’

Addressing a nation riven by civil war, Charles Eliot offered a solution for its dangerous disunity: education. “The American people are fighting the wilderness, physical and moral, on the one hand, and on the other are struggling to work out the awful problem of self-government,” he wrote. “For this fight they must be trained and armed.” In a word, educated.

Eliot’s essay, “The New Education,” 150 years ago this month, articulates a faith in the role of public education as an indispensable preparation for life. And by the 1920s, a free quality education for all had become an intrinsic value of American democracy. Yet today the majority of America’s close to 4 million public-high-school students say they are not learning enough or the right things in school; and as I’ve visited schools over the past 20 years, too many students have told me that they’re bored, uninspired, and unchallenged. These are not the inevitable complaints of existentially vexed teenagers. They are the well-founded fears and frustrations of 21st-century students attending schools designed in 1906—in effect, by