Co-ordination

T HE favorite educational dream of many political scientists-the complete integration of school administration and local government-will certainly not be realized in the foreseeable future, if ever. Public opinion, although perhaps indifferent at the outset, would be against it when aroused by fear of 'politics, depressed standards, and impoverishment. Professional educators would be vociferously against it. Public officials could not prove clean hands if they were to take the initiative. But apart from all this, the average citizen has a special affection for education, a special conviction that it is a professional matter, and therefore a special resistance to tampering with accustomed methods of governing education. It may be accurate to say some of this is folklore and mythology, but that does not change the situation. It only helps to explain. We are left, therefore, with the difficult problem of seeing that schools and other governmental services communicate, co-operate, and collaborate in more subtle ways, less officially and less formally. The task is to see that the schools and other governmental services, while maintaining their territorial integrity, harmonize their related efforts on all public programs concerned with the development of children and youth. In education literature, one gets the impression that the Constitution perhaps provided for the separation of school and government, just as of' church and state. There can be no doubt that a good thing has been carried too far, just as the merit system has thrived negatively on the fear of spoils politics so long that the lingering psychology blocks much positive personnel administration. At present, in a similar way, we suffer from the negative fear of contaminating education and educators by having them rub elbows with other public officials, whereas the times clearly call for positive approaches of the mutual-aid variety. No evil flows from the separation of school and government when they have no, or few, problems in common. But that time is past. The barricades will have to come down, somehow. .The trouble arises when problems are common but the attack is separate, if not indeed rival or competitive or possessively exclusive. Common problems call for common solutions, although the co-operators need not in any sense lose their identity. The evil of separation is the propensity to build rival power structures and to thwart the emergence, recognition, and service of the community of interest

Affection · Constitution · Conviction · Government (linguistics · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Law · Psychology · Religious Education and Schools · Social Psychology