Non-schooling

My current online course aims at helping students discern the nature of particular educational approaches. One aspect of that exercise is to discern how context influences what constitutes learning and education (and therefore, the roles of teacher-pupil or teacher-learner, master-apprentice, sensei-disciple, etc.). It doesn’t take long for most students to make the distinction that school is school but church is church (community).

Here are some thoughts from John Dewey, father of Progressive education, on the matter of schooling as education:

The subject matter of education consists of bodies of information and of skills that have been worked out in the past; therefore, the chief business of the school is to transmit them to the new generation. In the past, there have also been developed standards and rules of conduct; moral training consists in forming habits of action in conformity with these rules and standards. Finally, the general pattern of school organization (by which I mean the relations of pupils to one another and to the teachers) constitutes the school a kind of institution sharply marked off from other social institutions. Call up in imagination the ordinary schoolroom, its time-schedules, schemes of classification, or examination and promotion, or rules of order, and I think you will grasp what is meant by “pattern or organization.” If they you contrast this scene with what goes on in the family, for example, you will appreciate what is meant by the school being a kind of institution sharply marked off from any other form of social organization.*

Clarity about how context influences the educational enterprise, and appreciation for the distinctiveness of particular educational approaches, can lead to a better understanding about how one needs to go about the educational enterprise in one’s setting.

*John Dewey, Experience & Education. New York. A Touchstone Book. Simon & Shuster, pp. 17-18.