II. Look through the text again, find unknown words and write down them into your vocabulary.

III. Discuss the content of the text in the form of a dialogue.

IV. Make up a brief summary of the text in a written form.

TEXT 18

I. Read the text and define the main idea of it.

Education in the United States

The interplay of local, state and national programs and policies is particularly evident in the field of education. Historically, education has been considered the province of the state and local governments. Of the more than 3,000 colleges and universities, the academies of the armed services are among the few federal institutions. (The federal government also administers, among others, the College of the Virgin Islands.) For years, however, the federal government has been involved in education at all levels, beginning in 1862 with the grant of public lands to the states for the purpose of establishing colleges of agricultural and mechanical arts, called land-grant colleges. Additionally, the federal government supports school lunch programs, administers Indian education, makes research grants to universities, underwrites loans to college students and finances education for veterans. Whether the government should also give assistance to private and parochial (religious) schools has been widely debated. The Supreme Court has ruled that direct assistance to parochial schools is barred by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion’, although this has not been extended to the use of textbooks and so-called supplementary educational centres.

Although responsibility for elementary education still rests primarily with local government, it is increasingly affected by state and national policies. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, for example, required federal agencies to discontinue financial aid to school districts that are not racially integrated. For many school systems where blacks live in largely segregated enclaves, children must be transported long distances to achieve non-segregated schools.

Trends in education have been toward being more responsive to the needs of a complex society: preschool programs; classes in the community; summer and night schools; increased facilities for exceptional children; and educational programs geared to the culturally deprived and the disaffected student. Such programs, however, have been only partially successful.

II. Make up a vocabulary of new words.

III. Put 10 questions to the text.

IV. Give translations to the following words and word-combinations:

interplay, policy, province, local government, mechanical arts, purpose, to establish, land-grant college, to support, school lunch programs, loan, school parochial, to give assistance, supplementary educational centre, responsibility, elementary education, non-segregated, preschool program.

TEXT 19

I. Read this text and translate it into Ukrainian.

Educational Authorities

Despite recent changes, it is a characteristic of the British system that – there is comparatively little central control or uniformity. For example, education is managed not by one, but by three, separate government departments: the Department for Education and Employment is responsible for England and Wales alone – Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own departments. In fact, within England and Wales education has traditionally been seen as separate from 'training', and the two areas of responsibility have only recently been combined in a single department.

None of these central authorities exercises much control over the details of what actually happens in the country's educational institu­tions. All they do is to ensure the availability of education, dictate and implement its overall organization and set overall learning objectives (which they enforce through a system of inspectors) up to the end of compulsory education.

Central government does not prescribe a detailed programme of learning or determine what books and materials should be used. It says, in broad terms, what schoolchildren should learn, but it only offers occasional advice about how they should learn it. Nor does it dictate the exact hours of the school day, the exact dates of holidays or the exact age at which a child must start a full-time education. It does not manage an institution's finances either; it just decides how much money to give it. It does not itself set or supervise the marking of the exams which older teenagers do. In general, as many details as possible are left up to the individual institution or the Local Education Authority (LEA, a branch of local government).

One of the reasons for this level of 'grass-roots' independence is that the system has been influenced by the public-school tradition that a school is its own community. Most schools develop, to some degree at least, a sense of distinctiveness. Many, for example, have their own uniforms for pupils. Many, especially those outside the state system, have associations of former pupils. It is considered desir­able (even necessary) for every school to have its own school hall, big enough to accommodate every pupil, for daily assemblies and other occasional ceremonies. Universities, although financed by the government, have even more autonomy. Each one has complete control over what to teach, how to teach it, who it accepts as students and how to test these students.