Reading: Why do we educate? Renewing the conversation; pp. 21-41. Education and Schooling: A Relationship that can never be taken for Granted.

The distinction between Education and Schooling:
Schools are places were as education is an activity and an idea (as well as an ideal).

• Much of what we think of as education takes place outside of the school
• Almost anything we experience in life can be education.
• Personal experience, is more directly felt than anything we learn in school.
• Personal Note: I love this: “Our education is what is left when we may have forgotten most of the facts which we learned”.
• Schooling is, perhaps, a sort of education, but it is a far cry from what we conventionally think of as education.

 Schooling and the state:
The creation of compulsory public schooling had little to do with education in any real sense of that word, but much to do with the socialization and training of the young.

• Problems such as industrialization, secularization (religion), nationalism (patriotism), and democratization all had a common solution: Compulsory public schooling.
• It was in schools, following officially approved curricula , using prescribed text books, that the young would be taught the skills and values required by the new social forms that were emerging at this time.

 In the 19^th Century governments acquired the administrative and bureaucratic capacity to establish, maintain, and supervise nationwide systems of school.

• Public schooling was designed more as a tool of social policy than as an instrument of universal education.
• Schools, and especially elementary schools were designed to socialize, train, and even indoctrinate the young, to induct them into the societies in which they would spend their adult lives as citizens, not to expand their intellectual horizons, sharpen their minds and enlarge their capacity for thought and reflection which are surely the 3 defining characteristics of any education worth the name. 

Personal note: Very interesting. It is sad to think that they had the right idea so long ago but misused it. It would be a very different world if schools started off with the idea of educating and passing on knowledge to children to empower them and not to control them.

Creating Educational Space in Schools
Anyone with a cause (gender activists, the church, child rights activists) saw in the public schools a means of spreading their ideas. As a result, what schools taught and how they taught because subjects of public and often political debate and controversy.

The institution of pubic schooling led to the professionalization of teaching and so created a wide and interlinked network of training institutions, laboratory schools, research projects, journals and conferences that made schooling a subject of intense professional and academic debate.

• Many of the new breed of educationalist and teachers were not content to socialize children; they wanted to educate them.
•  Personal Note: YES!

 In the late 19^th Century alternative ways of teaching were revealed to teachers.

• Schooling slipped from the control of the governments that sought to direct it.
• Schooling became (as it remains) a contested arena in which different political, ideological, and social grouping struggle for influence and control.
  >These controversies and debates opened the door through which
  education could enter the classrooms and serve as something of a
  counterweight to the prevailing forces of socialization and training.

Schooling, Education and Democratic Citizenship
Probably one of the more potent single factors in this opening up of the educational potential of schooling in the 20^th Century was the advancing democratization of social and political life.

• Democratic citizenship demands that citizens be not merely schooled but educated.

Liberal Education and the Schools
It is in school that most of us- and only in school that many of us- stand a chance of being introduced to a vision of education and what it can do for us and the society we live in.

• Education introduces us to worlds we might otherwise have never encountered, thereby reshaping out visions of the world we think we know.

 Liberal education entails introducing students to the never-ending conversation about what it means to be human and to live together with others.

• No liberal education worth of the name can content itself simply with the transmission of information from teachers to students.
• It demands pedagogy of dialogue and inquiry, of teaching with students rather than at hem.

 There can be a substantial difference between curriculum- as- prescribed, the curriculum-as-taught, and the curriculum-as-experienced by the students.

• The extent to which schools educate their students depends not simply on the curriculum but very much on teachers, who need not only be familiar with their subjects but to have their own conceptions of education and what it means to be educated and to know how they will help their students obtain the education in which they, as teachers, believe.
• Ever since the late 19^th Century teachers have been urged to adopt the method of adapting curricula to students’ needs and interests and to abandon textbooks in favour of multiple resources and use the progress of each individual student as the measure of pedagogical success.

Personal Note: It is extremely interesting to see how “Liberal Education” came to be. Growing out of the idea of democratization and educating students to be good citizens. I think that education in the 21^st century is working towards very exciting changes, with aspects of social and emotional learning becoming embedded into the education system and educating students on a more holistic level, thus creating well rounded, intelligent and socially stable young adults.

 If we want teachers to truly educate their students, we have to rethink teacher education and improve teachers’ working conditions.