Here is a link to a Washington Post commentary by George Will. And here is a citation: “The report was so “seismic” — Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s word — that Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration released it on Fourth of July weekend, 1966, hoping it would not be noticed. But the Coleman Report did disturb various dogmatic slumbers and vested interests. And 50 years on, it is pertinent to today’s political debates about class and social mobility. So, let us now praise an insufficiently famous man, sociologist James Coleman, author of the study “Equality of Educational Opportunity.”
The rest you can figure our yourself. What Will brings up is of of now less importance now than what it was when that original report was released. And the social science behind it perhaps also an aspect of all the current debates concerning education´s digital future? Education´s future is also an aspect of a fast changing society, where the “digital” is not so much an aspect of education as a precursor to many of the challenges now facing education, educators and education policy makers: Like an increasingly mobile society, an increasingly fragmented society wavering towards extremes, a lack of cohesive social capital — the list goes on.
Whether one agrees with Will´s point of view is another matter. The key: The changing cultural contexts of contemporary education challenges.