Abstract
This book is volume III of the trilogy on The Idea of Public Education. The overall aim of The Idea of Public Education is to lay the groundwork for the establishment of an objectively valid social-natural empirical science of public education. In volume I, Education and Society [Wells (2012)], the fundamental axioms and functions for a social-natural empirical science of public education were deduced from the basic acroams of the phenomenon of mind. Volume II, Critique of the American Institution of Education [Wells (2013)], is a Critical analysis of the history of public education in America. This analysis reveals that there are crucial and fundamental errors in this institution. These errors are so serious and so fundamental that was not possible to conclude otherwise than that a major reform of that system is necessary and urgent. This present volume is a proposal for the way in which this reform should be done. It presents the empirical principles of the reform – derived from the axioms and functions of volume I – and it presents the rudiments of a social-natural science of public education. It does not address the topic of private education. It likewise does not address reform of teacher education or the publishing of textbooks and other educational material. Reforms in both are needed in order to implement the reforms presented in this treatise, but those reforms are additional topics in their own right.