97 WCD as a (W(H)olistic Response 2 schools may emphasize such rudiments as reading and computation at the expense of other essential skills such as comprehension, analysis, solving problems and drawing conclusions. Still others are concerned that an overemphasis on technical and occupational skills will leave little time for studying the arts and humanities that so enrich daily life, help maintain civility, and develop a sense of community. Knowledge of the humanities, they maintain, must be harnessed to science and technology if the latter are to remain creative and humane, just as the humanities need to be informed by science and technology if they are to remain relevant to the human condition. (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 12) The high standards for schools imposed based on A Nation At Risk led, over time, to significant pressure concerning accountability for meeting the prescribed cognitive and academic standards. This pressure was strengthened in 2001 following the approval of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, with President G.W. Bush stating his great concern that ‘too many of our neediest children are being left behind’ (No Child Left Behind Act of 2001). The NCLB Act contained four cornerstones: increased accountability for states, school districts and schools; greater choice for parents and students, particularly those attending low-performing schools; more flexibility for states and local educational agencies regarding the use of federal education dollars; and a stronger emphasis on reading, especially for the youngest children. Despite the focus on improving education and leaving no one behind, both attempts (of the Reagan administration and, later, the Bush administration) led to a reductionist focus on outcomes that did not work well for all children or for education as a whole. Based on the discussion in Chapter 1 of this dissertation, they could be described as attempts to combat the challenges of reductionism and deep fragmentation that were reductionistic and fragmented in and of themselves and, therefore, could not lead to anything other than the exacerbation of the fragmentation problem. In particular, in the years before the scheduled evaluation of the NCLB Act in 2005, there was a clear focus on the education of the whole child among a wide range of scholars, based on a fundamental critique of the NCLB practices and outcomes. This critique was raised almost simultaneously in a special edition of Educational Leadership from September 2005, which was dedicated to ‘The Whole Child’, and a conference held at Yale University on ‘Play = Learning’, where Zigler and Bishop-Josef juxtaposed the cognitive child and the whole child. The conference led to a book featuring a contribution by Zigler and Bishop-Josef based on the pedagogies of Piaget and Vygotsky (Singer et al., 2006). In the same year, the Association for Supervision and
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