Philosophy of Schooling

All human societies, past and present, have had a vested interest in education; and some wits have claimed that teaching (at its best an educational activity) is the second oldest profession. While not all societies channel sufficient resources in to support for educational activities and institutions, all at the least acknowledge their centrality and for lovely reasons. For thing, it is apparent that babies are born illiterate and innumerate, and ignorant of the norms and cultural achievements of the community or society in to which they have been thrust; but with the help of professional teachers and the dedicated amateurs in their families and immediate environs (and with the aid, of educational resources made obtainable through the media and nowadays the net), within a few years they can read, write, calculate, and act (at least often) in culturally-appropriate ways.

Some learn these skills with more facility than others, and so schooling also serves as a social-sorting mechanism and without a doubt has giant impact on the economic fate of the individual. Put more abstractly, at its best schooling equips individuals with the skills and substantive knowledge that lets them define and to pursue their own goals, and also lets them participate in the life of their community as full-fledged, autonomous citizens.

But this is to cast matters in individualistic terms, and it is fruitful also to take a societal point of view, where the picture changes . It emerges that in pluralistic societies such as the Western democracies there's some groups that do not wholeheartedly support the development of autonomous individuals, for such folk can weaken a group from within by thinking for themselves and challenging communal norms and beliefs; from the point of view of groups whose survival is thus threatened, formal, state-provided schooling is not necessarily a lovely thing.

But in other ways even these groups depend for their continuing survival on educational processes, as do the larger societies and nation-states of which they are part; for as John Dewey put it in the opening chapter of his classic work Democracy and Schooling (1916), in its broadest sense schooling is the means of the asocial continuity of life (Dewey 1916, three). Dewey pointed out that the a primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each of the constituent members in a social group make schooling a necessity, for despite this biological inevitability the life of the group goes on (Dewey, three). The great social importance of schooling is underscored, by the fact that when a society is shaken by a crisis, this often is taken as a sign of educational breakdown; schooling, and educators, become scapegoats.