ABSTRACT

Schools are underpowered in relation to the goals they try to attain. People more directly involved in schools set more modest and apparently realistic goals: the effective transmission of a body of knowledge, the promotion of physical, intellectual and artistic skills, the inculcation of socio-moral values and attitudes, and the development of acceptable habits of behaviour. This chapter argues that a general expansion in the power of teachers at all levels of the school hierarchy is necessary for increased effectiveness. This means that more teachers must be able to take final decisions, or have a genuine voice in such decisions, which relate to the circumstances in which they work. One reason why schools are impotent is that they are a bore. This is no more than one would expect of schools which are performing their classical tasks in a radically transformed social environment: no longer information-poor but information-rich, no longer action-rich but action-poor.