Providing for Individual Differences via Unit Organization

N A democracy every boy and girl should have the chance to obtain well-rounded education. But real equality of educational opportunity has been slow in coming. In large number of high schools it has not yet arrived, although considerable progress is evident. In these schools the traditional curricula have not been sufficiently modified, adapted or differentiated to provide adequately for individual differences. The principle of educational equality implies that every pupil should be given the fullest possible opportunity for the development of his individual potentialities. There is no implication that all should be treated alike. Quite the contrary. The presumption that identical treatment should be accorded to all is indeed flagrant denial of the principle of equality. This equality of educational opportunity which democracy demands is not to be confused with identity of opportunity. An educational experience that will nurture one mind will be indigestible to another. Our ideal is that of equal opportunity for all the children of all the people. In practice, however, the ideal is by no means achieved. The traditional practice of fitting boys and girls of varied interests, backgrounds, abilities, needs, and aims into single lock-step type of foreign language course, with uniform assignments, textbooks, and standards for all has proved most unsatisfactory. In actual practice this undemocratic policy of mass instruction has resulted in serious maladjustments, high rates of mortality, mediocre achievement, and the continuous need of justifying modern foreign language instruction. Stated in more challenging language: Secondary education is faced with the gigantic problem of providing for all who enter and persist in the school, and failure to provide offerings suited to the capacities of those who do not respond to traditional subject-matter means large educational waste and futility, mere attendance under kind of duress, or wholesale ejection into the streets and alleys. The reorganization of our modern foreign language courses according to the Unit Method proposed by Dr. Billettx will greatly alleviate this condition. The Unit Method, according to Billett, is a systematic way of

Aesthetics · Curriculum · Democracy · Denial · Equal opportunity · Ideal (ethics) · Identity (music) · Law and economics · Mathematics education · Nature versus nurture · Pedagogy · Political science · Presumption · Sociology · Unit (ring theory) · Law · Psychology · Religious Education and Schools · Taxation and Legal Issues

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