The Enigma of Public Schools - A Three-Episode, Six-Hour Documentary Series

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The Enigma of Public Schools
A Three-Episode, Six-Hour Documentary Series

The Fourth Purpose will be the first documentary to provide a context within which the nature of the American public school system may be examined.
Throughout history, schools have invariably offered their students guidance in achieving three key goals recognized as essential to living a meaningful existence:

To be a good person
To be a good citizen
To live the life one chooses

At the dawn of this new millennium, in the richest and most powerful nation on earth, is it not troubling to note that the school system which purports to serve more than 50 million of its children is routinely unable to deliver on any of those three goals? What is the reason for this? How badly damaged are our children? What can be done? These will be the questions addressed in our documentary as we explore our central theme: What is the purpose of the American public schools?

A nation that believes that it can live long, free and ignorant, believes what never was and never will be...

- Thomas Jefferson

[Administration] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom restrained from acting, such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd.

- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America

It would be a mistake to assume that the present-day educational system is unchanging. On the contrary, it is undergoing rapid change. But much of this change is no more than an attempt to refine the existent machinery, making it ever more efficient in pursuit of obsolete goals.

-Alvin Toffler

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