schools should be relevant to contemporarylife, that in order to achieve that students need to ‘manage their own
learning’, and that the object of schooling is not to ‘transmit a body of knowledge’ but to encourage pupils to ‘love learning for its own sake’.
The sphere of education
The sphere of education today is extensive and education is generally
highly valued. In most countries, in addition to a developed system of state
schooling, there is a rapidly expanding system of higher education, including
institutions focused on such diverse things as art, computing, cooking,
fashion design, and business, and a constant call for further qualification
and accreditation in a variety of practices and pursuits, such as the hospitality
industry, paralegal and paramedical services, mechanics, psychological
services, accountancy, and horticulture. Alongside the state system a num-
ber of private education establishments at all levels, from primary to teacher
training, has arisen. Self-education manuals and books are one of the more
lucrative sides of publishing, and educational programs of one kind or
another abound on television and the net. Governments, by and large, main-
tain or increase their spending on education regularly, and proclaim it to be
one of their first priorities. Similarly, world organizations and authorities
ceaselessly emphasize education as crucial to poor or troubled areas
throughout the world. A great deal of money, too, is pumped into educational
research of one kind or another, in addition to the enormous basic investment
in educational establishments of all kinds. Education, in short, is widely
pervasive, takes a good slice of our resources, and is fairly indiscriminately
valued. It is very big business, although we seldom think of it in that way.
the first and one of the most important tasks
for those who wish to understand and contribute to sound educational policy
and practice is to analyse the concept of education; to give an account of the
idea; to determine what precisely counts as being well-educated.
Training, socialization, and education
We refer to the ‘educational system’, but that organization of schools,
colleges, and universities in fact does a number of other things besides
educate. Conversely, education doesn’t only take place in some part of the
system: people’s education may be advanced in all sorts of ways, through
their friends, by travel, on the web, by reading, by experience, by parents,
or by self-reflection, to name but a few. So, before we attempt to analyse
the concept formally (see Chapter 3), it may be useful to distinguish
between education and some related concepts which, though distinct, may
also be the concern of the educational system.
A typical dictionary definition of education might refer to it as
‘upbringing’ or ‘acquiring knowledge’. In this sense practically anything
one experiences, hears, or reads may be said to be part of one’s education
whether sensible or silly, coherent or incoherent, true or false, and regard-
less of how one came by the knowledge. It is in this sense that we refer to
the education system, implying no distinctions between various things that
might be learnt or how they might be taught. The most telling aspect of this
broad concept of the educational system is that it is value-free. By contrast
the concept of education itself is evaluative; it is by definition a good
thing; (it is what is technically sometimes called a normative term). Why it
is necessarily desirable and what makes it so, will be examined when we
analyse the concept fully, but for the moment we need only note the
distinction between the value-free concept of the educational system and
the normative concept of education itself.
to illustrate that to
define a term or analyse a concept, you need to do more than give
examples, you need to explain why they are examples and, if values are
involved, you need to support the implied value judgements with reasoning)
The value of some of them, such as categorization or
stereotyping of individuals, might be debated, but training and socialization
seem in themselves to be desirable, even necessary and unavoidable,
aspects of upbringing.
There are other possible functions of the school, such as condi-
tioning, indoctrinating, and closing the mind, which are inherently objection-
able and antithetical to education.
But training
and socialization seem proper and desirable functions of schooling.
So
at rock bottom I am claiming that the justification for a public or state
system of schooling is the utilitarian or practical one that this is the most
likely way to ensure that all children, of whatever background, have an
equal opportunity to enter an educational environment, and that the main
emphasis should be on the educative rather than other functions of schooling.
In other times and places it has been clearly demonstrated that socializing
and training the young to follow in the father’s trade can be effectively done
through the family. However, there is little reason to suppose that most
people (especially the poor and relatively disadvantaged) will have a realistic
chance of becoming well-educated without a (free) public system of
schooling.