Custom essays on The Schools, Community, and Frontier Purposes

As a matter of fact, for centuries public schools played special role in the society. Their main goal was to prepare young people, to give a universal store of knowledge that meets the requirements of time. Consequently, it is logical to assume that over time these goals have changed. I strongly believe that the mission of public schools is to prepare young people, depending on the types of inclination and dispositions, help them identify their further specialization, in particular in what role they will be most effective for society.
As a fact, in early 20th century our economy was largely agrarian. It should be noted that this explains the fact that summer – the harvest season has traditionally been and still is not learning period. In other words, in early 20th century children during the summer helped adults with harvest. Moreover, it is essential to note that agriculture at that time had low level of mechanization and most processes people did by hand. In addition, the industrial sector in the United States was in its infancy. This explains the fact that the school curriculum at that time included such subjects as labor, which was designed to teach youth the basics of labor and thus prepare people for future work in the plants and factories.
In turn, the mission of 21st century public schools is closely connected with the fact that depending on the preferable, student should choose his further specialization and learn those subjects, in which he is interested in. It can be explained due to the fact that with the development of science and technology, as well as a powerful technological breakthrough in late 1980s, the economy has become much more complicated, appeared new industries and subsectors; the equipment becomes more complex and more accurate. Therefore, society needs more qualified personnel to manage this equipment. In other words, to become a professional and receive specialty, which is in demand – a student should focus on the learning of several disciplines. I would like to mention that we are talking about a particular specialization of people. Thus, it can be said that if in the early 20th century, the school prepared the so-called “universal” students, which knew everything by a few, at the beginning of the 21st century there is a tendency in public schools to further focus the students on several academic disciplines in order to prepare highly qualified specialists in one particular area.
In my opinion, despite the specialization tendency, the influence of public schools of early 20th century is still considerable. Like it was mentioned above – summer holidays remains so-called tribute to tradition of harvesting. Nowadays, there are no contraindications to radically change the education system, with the introduction of new techniques that allow usage of the most efficient ways to prepare students for future life. However, every generation consider that it has not the right to change the system itself as it was brought up on it. Moreover, nowadays, students still have to learn a lot of subjects, which they consider as unnecessary. For example, by learning international economy, student should took a course of higher mathematics, which, with all respect, unlikely will be useful for him in life. Thus, I would like to say that today still there is influence from that era still evident.