The schools have been caught in the middle of opposing pressures pulling and pushing them in different directions. Some critics accuse them of being authoritarian, inhumane, irrelevant, and unresponsive to student needs. Such
titles as Crisis in the Classroom , Children Under Pressure, Death at an Early Age, How Children Fail, and Murder in the Classroom leave little doubt as to the authors' opinions about the educational system. Other writers hold contrary views. Dobay (1973), for example, contends that a crisis indeed exists in the nation's classrooms, but that the problem is directly attributable to the erosion of discipline and academic standards that has been allowed to occur. Too, the move toward a conceptualization of society as being pluralistic has multiplied the demands upon the curriculum in the schools that have not been encountered in the past.
To compound their difficulties, educators are being forced under present conditions to seek solutions to the problems of education in a situation in which they have lost much public confidence and financial support. In addition, enrollments that had continued to rise almost continuously now are beginning to drop. The "baby boom" of World War II has passed through the schools, and the birth rate is declining in the nation. The Statistical Abstract of the United States 1974 states that the number of children under five years old declined as follows: 1960—20.3 (million); 1965—19.8; 1970—17.2; and 1973— 16.7.
In the past, the schools have faced perplexing problems, but none that seem to demand more radical solutions than those confronting educators at present. Innovative curricula are necessitated by a profound break with educational criteria of the past. Up to this point in the history of education, the major stress has been on increasing the number of years in school and on increasing the numbers of students and the numbers of programs. Now the concern is shifting to qualitative aspects of the curriculum, which are much more difficult to comprehend and to make primary objectives of the educational system. According to Fischer (1971, p. 562), "The entire range of current discussion centering on individualization, learning styles, teaching styles, differentiated staffing, performance criteria, integrated schooling, the education of the gifted, the new curricula, and a host of other topics shows the influence of qualitative ideals at work."
Mouly (1973, p. vi) summarizes the many currents in contemporary education as follows:
The public school has been undergoing major changes ranging from a shift from the self-contained classroom to team teaching to greater emphasis on relevance, on the one hand, and behavioral objectives, behavior modification techniques, and accountability, on the other hand. Integration, for instance, has accelerated the need for a greater understanding of minority classes, not only those in the ghettos. Meanwhile, recent emphasis on humanism, e.g., the Third Force, has led to greater interest in the child as a unique individual, with a sense of purpose and a capacity for growth and self-determination—and, as a corollary, to a greater awareness that education is valuable to the extent that it is
personally meaningful. In the process, it has altered the role of the teacher and otherwise forced a major reconstruction of the pedagogical as well as philosophical outlook.