Ernest Boyer

As President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and as United States Commissioner of Education, Ernest L. Boyer (1928 - 1995) was regarded as the most influential person in American education. His grandfather William Boyer -- head of the Mission of the Brethren in Christ Church in his Dayton Ohio -- first directed Ernest towards a people-centered life. Boyer attended Messiah College and later earned his master's and doctorate at the University of Southern California. In 1965 he joined the State University of New York system and five years later became its Chancellor. The 64-campus university was the largest in the United States with over 350,000 students. In 1977, President Carter named Boyer the U.S. Commissioner of Education. He later became President of the Carnegie Foundation and began an initiative to bring more attention to education at every level, with a concentration on the earliest years of a child's education. In 1983. Dr. Boyer's report, "High School. A Report on Secondary Education," had an impact even before it was published. When officials at the U.S. Department of Education learned that Dr. Boyer was working on a report describing the inadequacies of secondary public education and proposing a series of changes. they decided to start their own study, which came to be called A Nation at Risk. This report was described as a national wake-up call, spelling out the failure of public high schools to provide students with basic knowledge and skills. Dr. Boyer held that education improvements were bypassing too many impoverished children, with dire consequences for the future of America. He advocated programs in nutrition, prenatal care for teenage mothers and daycare for their children, along with extended summer classes and preschool education. In 1987, when Dr. Boyer detected that one of the major ills of higher education was that research was elbowing aside teaching, he wrote the report "College: The Undergraduate Experience in America," in which he argued that at every university teaching should be valued as highly as research. The book advanced the view that much research is pointless and even harmful insofar as it distracts teachers from students. Dr. Boyer was the recipient of numerous awards including more than 140 honorary degrees. In this audio podcast, recorded during the Academy of Achievement's 1984 Summit in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Dr. Boyer describes the elements that make a great teacher, and addresses the importance of teachers in our society.