The purpose of this research is to examine issues relating to advocacy on children's behalf, not only in the school setting but in the whole range of their lives in the modern period, relative to the push for such advocacy elaborated by Patricia Albjerg Graham in SOS: Sustain Our Schools. The plan of the research will be to set forth the controlling ideas of .SOS., and then to discuss various potential responses to such ideas as may be discerned from classic philosophical positions, as well as the relevance of such ideas to the challenges of the modern period.
Graham's basic point appears to be that the pockets of excellence in institutions of universal public education should as far as possible be duplicated in every school in the country. The sad truth is that, all too often, excellence in elementary and secondary public education is predicated of neighborhood affluence or an extraordinary but isolated institutional programs of various configurations. Graham is hardly against excellence in education. But more than excellence itself, she wants to enlarge access to excellence in public education, not by demanding specific measures of achievements but rather by centering the educational process and environment it on students, focusing less on institutional, faculty, or even curriculum-specific concerns than on "the attainment of a set of skills, knowledge, and values that encourage one to learn on one's own, to participate fully in the society, and to be a competent employee" (Graham, 1992, p. 26).
The concept of public education as student- or child-centered drives the statement that children need advocates, and that the business community is uniquely well positioned and should be well motivated to function as such. The special position of business is an point to which we shall return. The present point, which encases that one, is that as public school systems are organized and run today, a whole range of interest groups has ac...