Education in a democracy has many aims. It must develop abilities in the humanities, arts, and sciences, provide opportunities for growth in community life, and prepare young people for responsible citizenship. It must therefore introduce a wide range of intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic skills and values. But education must also elicit and begin to train the talents that are necessary for the world of work. And that task has become increasingly complex in our technological society. This number of On Common Ground considers some of the ways in which school­university partnerships may assist in that task.

• The lead essay by Secretary of Labor Robert Reich focuses on the very disturbing loss of "pathways to the middle class." What is needed, he argues, is "the re­creation of career paths and upward mobility for less­educated and less­skilled Americans." That will require new efforts to establish "common ground between secondary and post­secondary education and between 'work' and 'school,'" directed in large part toward such growing fields as nursing, computer information systems, medical technology, and allied health jobs. Secretary Reich discusses the School­to­Work Opportunities Act, which requires that "working relationships" be formed and maintained "between and among partners from education, business, and the community." He notes the broad range of partners that are becoming involved in such efforts, the need for secondary and post­ secondary schools to create a cohesive "tech prep" curriculum, and the important role to be played here by community colleges.
• Thomas W. Payzant, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education in the United States Department of Education, spells out the implications of the Goals 2000 Educate America Act and the Improving America's Schools Act. This legislation, envisaging a comprehensive reform, focuses on "raising the academic achievement of all students to a high level" by supporting the efforts of states and school districts. Payzant describes the need for universities to become involved in state and local reform plans, and the various ways in which they can become partners with districts in the development and implementation of those plans.
• Timothy P. Ready's essay on health science partnerships deals with one important sector of the workforce the nation's physicians and the difficult problem of recruiting and preparing minority students to enter that group. He describes how Project 3000 by 2000 is now involving medical schools in a variety of health science partnerships with local school systems, community­based organizations, and undergraduate colleges. And he shows how each partner, like the nation as a whole, stands to gain much from these joint efforts.
• Partnerships with business are approached in different ways by three other essayists. Edward Kisailus, a professor of biology, stresses the need in today's workforce for a greater range of competencies including resource management, interpersonal skills, information management, systems interrelationships, and technology literacy. He suggests that schools, universities, and business collaborate on a new paradigm of lifelong education, which would bring together technical training, academic content, and higher theoretical and conceptual skills.
• Thomas E. Persing, a superintendent of schools, argues that in such an effort we can learn a great deal from the system of apprenticeship in Germany. If a comparable (though not identical) system were established in this country, it could involve universities in various ways, and it might lead to significant changes in the schools' approaches to many academic subjects.
• And Thomas Furtado speaks from his personal experience at United Technologies with opportunities and difficulties in this area. Concerns shared by business and the schools run a gamut from basic reading skills to sequential curricula in science and mathematics. But it is clear that we must learn to trust each other more, and to work harder, in order to lay the groundwork for collaboration in our own communities.
• Fred Hechinger's regular column deals this time with the need to understand school­university partnerships as "permanent enterprises." Though On Common Ground is not a promotional organ, we are grateful for Hechinger's comments on the Yale­New Haven Teachers Institute. He offers some important warnings about the necessary basis for attempts to replicate the Yale experience in other cities. The Institute has long worked with groups elsewhere; and it hopes to do so more systematically in future years. The opportunities that follow from the Goals 2000 Act, as described by Thomas Payzant, make such nation­wide efforts all the more urgent.

Our cover illustration, which relates most closely to Secretary Reich's essay, portrays the "instruments of power" in the United States as of 1930 but as part of a mural cycle that recognizes the need for continuing social and economic creativity. Indeed, Thomas Hart Benton had learned a good deal from the philosopher John Dewey, the American historian Charles Beard, and the historian of culture Lewis Mumford. Benton's faith in modern democracy was a faith in the power of people to make use of technology, not to be used by it. The "instruments" are not in themselves "aims." Wise use of technology, Benton understood, requires continuing reform of our institutions. "Change of form," he said, "is just as much the essence of a true democracy as it is of a living art. It is the will and ability to change forms under the pressure of new needs and new experience in a living, going environment, that proclaims the very reality of democracy and makes it technically serviceable in real government."

A major challenge in the field of education is to ensure that our technological society is open to the talents of those of every race and every social or economic stratum. Benton's recognition of that challenge, at his earlier moment in our history, is evident in City Building, the concluding panel in his mural cycle for the New School of Social Research. This portrayal of the excavation stage of building includes, at the left, a monumental image of a racially­mixed work crew a bold image indeed for 1930, when prejudice still excluded blacks from most union locals. Building Common Laborers was one of the few unions that accepted black members.

With T. P. Ready's essay on Project 3000 by 2000, which aims to increase minority representation in medical education, we include a contemporary image that leads us into a child's experience of healing in one kind of Hispanic context. Carmen Lomas Garza's Curandera (Healer), which we reproduce with its accompanying explanatory text in both English and Spanish, comes from her book, Family Pictures. This book, which is designed for children, often reflects Lomas Garza's own early experience. It was brought to our attention by Manuel N. Gsmez of our Editorial Board.

Relating also to the theme of minorities in education is the image we reproduce with Thomas W. Payzant's essay on the Goals 2000 Educate America Act and the Improving America's Schools Act. This painting, titled Playground (Recess), is by the African American artist, Archibald J. Motley, Jr. Suggesting children's art in its naive perspective, high horizon, and linear treatment of the figures, it evokes the energy of playground life and also portrays the interracial harmony that is possible there. The painting is a study for Motley's mural project of about 1940 for the Doolittle School on East 35th Street in Chicago. Like much of the art sponsored by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, those murals have since been covered over or destroyed. This painting is now in the collection of African American art established by Harriet O. Kelley and her husband Harmon Kelley, M.D., an obstetrician and gynecologist. The Kelley's entire collection will be shown at the Smithsonian Institution from April 23 to the end of August in 1995. With Playground we include some comments by Harriet O. Kelley that appeared in a recent issue of JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association (June 15, 1994).

On the back cover, to accompany the essays on partnerships with business by Edward Kisailus, Thomas Persing, and Thomas Furtado, we have reproduced Charles Demuth's painting of 1921, Business. No doubt the regular grid, the calendar, and the dominating digits in this painting suggest an impersonal world of office work. But Demuth has here transfigured that world through an asymmetrical composition, some unpredictably angled and shadowy reflections of buildings, and refreshing delicacies of tint. We can here discern the creative human factor the basis for all our optimism about the world of work not in the explicit "subject" of the painting but in the artist's subtle rendering of its motifs.