ABSTRACT
The structure of the public education system is now badly out of date and new forms will have to be found, more relevant to contemporary society. Centralized schools had a real professional function. Today, on the other hand, they are serving a literate, affluent population conditioned to entertainment and advertising in a community-less society. The key problem with the mass schools today is that they exacerbate the poverty of real persons in a child’s life. Today a child’s only adult contacts tend to be with his mother—oppressed and harried as she is in the small-child-raising phase—and a series of vestal maidens in school who must forever remain symbolic and ritual in their importance to him. For a child knows that his teacher is with him only a year or less. In addition, she has thirty other kids to serve and usually has no social contact with the family.
