Group items tagged

While not all societies channel sufficient resources into support for educational activities and institutions, all at the very least acknowledge their centrality—and for good reasons

within a few years they can read, write, calculate, and act (at least often) in culturally-appropriate ways

education also serves as a social-sorting mechanism and undoubtedly has enormous impact on the economic fate of the individual.

education equips individuals with the skills and substantive knowledge that allows them to define and to pursue their own goals, and also allows them to participate in the life of their community as full-fledged, autonomous citizens

societal perspective, where the picture changes somewhat

groups depend for their continuing survival on educational processes, as do the larger societies and nation-states of which they are part

The great social importance of education is underscored, too, by the fact that when a society is shaken by a crisis, this often is taken as a sign of educational breakdown; education, and educators, become scapegoats.

education as transmission of knowledge versus education as the fostering of inquiry and reasoning skills that are conducive to the development of autonomy

the question of what this knowledge, and what these skills, ought to be

how learning is possible, and what is it to have learned something—two sets of issues that relate to the question of the capacities and potentialities that are present at birth, and also to the process (and stages) of human development and to what degree this process is flexible and hence can be influenced or manipulated

liberal education and vocational education

personal development or education for citizenship

distinction between educating versus teaching versus training versus indoctrination

education and maintenance of the class structure of society, and the issue of whether different classes or cultural groups can—justly—be given educational programs that differ in content or in aims

whether or not all children have a right to state-provided education

relation between education and social reform, centering upon whether education is essentially conservative, or whether it can be an (or, the) agent of social change

These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, criteria for selecting evidence that has relevance for the problems that they consider central, and the like.

for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education (as Dewey pointed out), and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches, or the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like