ABSTRACT
This chapter is about how various contemporary paradigms work. A paradigm is a complex model that holds a set of beliefs, in this case, about education. The one-room country schoolhouse was a paradigm, as are the finishing school for young ladies, the military academy, the “reform school,” and the boys’ prep school where boys wear navy blazers and the principal is called the headmaster. The Catholic school of my youth, with habit-garbed, ruler-wielding nuns, is a paradigm, as is the high-ceilinged urban classroom of the first half of the twentieth century, with its forty-odd desks bolted into rows. In the 1960s, suburban towns boasted low-swung centralized high schools servicing thousands of students with courses like home economics (then called homemaking, for girls only) and industrial arts (then called shop, for boys only). Home schooling, with its reliance on the Internet or its fundamentalist Christian ideology and skepticism about “government intervention” in public schools, is another paradigm, not so new but fervent and gaining ground.
