It's Tuesday, October 22nd, 2024.

I'm Albert Moller and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Over the course of the last several decades we have seen an utter reshaping of the educational landscape in the United States.

If you were to go back to say the 1950s or the 1960s and you

were to look at what was basically nearly a universal experience of schools, public schools from the first grade to the 12th grade, later

kindergarten added, you look at that and you would recognize that the vast majority of

Americans simply assumed that normal meant children going to neighborhood schools described

as the common schools, increasingly the public schools.

The terminology about the common school emerged when it was argued that a part of the American experience should be the supporting of a system of common schools.

That is, they would commonly be populated by students, and they would be

supported by taxpayers, they would be community-based schools, they would be a

part of the Commons. As you move through the late 19th and going to the 20th centuries, those schools are increasingly

described as the public schools.

And as American towns grew larger and America's largest cities grew into metropolitan areas, these became very sophisticated,

very complicated educational systems.

And right now, our educational systems are some of the most complicated systems to be found

anywhere in American culture. You look at a major metropolitan area like just say

Los Angeles or Chicago or New York. you are looking at something that's so complicated,

it would take you a good deal of time even to get a basic grasp of how it's organized.

You would have different school systems, you would have different school boards, you would have a lot of partisan politics,

you'd have a lot of what we will talk about later is ideological capture.

You would have a lot of sociological issues at stake.

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