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Education: a. The social institution that gives priority to transfer and extension, sometimes by imposition, the accumulated ideas, standards, knowledge, and techniques to less informed members of society. b. Consists of novices learning to manage and expand the vocabulary and logic of social codes used by the most informed people in a society. c. The acculturation of newer, younger, and/or less informed members of society by more informed, usually older members. d. The primary social arrangement to prepare learners to earn the benefits of participating in other social institutions (e.g., economy, family, polity) and social arrangements. Synonyms: Education is a social institution; sometimes the word is used as a colloqualism referring to any aspect of the social institution. Schools are a formal organization of the social institution to increase specific learning by students. Schooling is the process of managing learning conducted in schools. Learning is the socially required result of schooling. Training is the instruction of a learner to increase the likelihood of meeting a specific observable performance criterion, as in training a soldier for combat or a violinist for a concert. Highlights of EducationEducation is the only social institution that gives priority to defeating ignorance in society. Toward this end, societies create and support formal organization, such as schools staffed with people and material to increase the rate of learning of each learner. Historically, schools and school personnel rated the best are those whose students learn to do what the most informed people in society do. That standard includes preparing learnerss to extend and in some cases replace what the most informed do. |
Introduction to Education
The social institution of education accounts for the assimilation of individuals into a cultural tradition. Usually, education viewed this way occurs with conscious purpose and deliberation.
education also accounts for ways that individuals form attitudes and efforts to reduce (through alternatives) influences of traditional ways of maintaining social life.
Observers monitor changes in behavior patterns of learners to have confidence that these goals are met.
For a variety of reasons, including personal and academic background, cultural, political and religious preferences, as well as personal aspirations, educators differ in their views of education.
While educators and analysts might not describe these two views the same way, they encounter both daily in and out of schools. Lack of agreement on which view to use in schooling led for at least two centuries to settling these differences in polity and economics.
Classic Education View
Educators in classic education schools view their responsibility as systematically offering to novices what others do and ways they refine and extend what they do. These educators expect novices to remember and use what others know in order to make future informed decisions in and out of school.
They also recognize that, with this background, their alumni will most likely serve as leaders of communities, enterprises and formal organizations, including governments.
Such leaders can use their background to introduce and manage social changes more reliably and with greater confidence in options available to them.
Educators for Social Change View
Educatorsfor social change view their responsibility as preparing novices to express themselves about the utility and value of information and skills they acquire and want to learn in schools. They expect each learner to make reliable and useful decisions about what to learn. They recognize that some alumni who do better than others will serve as examples and in other ways assist their peers to make better decisions. In these ways, they argue that people should work together to reform society to better fit its members.
Educators with different views know about each other’s procedures and instructional content. A relative few can argue these differences persuasively. Fewer still can successfully implement strategies and practices of both views.
Educators know that the more specific the school assignment, the more likely students will complete it successfully. Yet, most public school educators opt for more open assignments.
A Learners’ View
For learners, indecisions of educators about what constitutes the education offer an eclectic, non-patterned learning venue with limited confidence in its value.
Thus, learners follow their same individual procedures under either view of education. They determine what they must do individually to complete assignments or solve other problems, and whether they will pay the cost to do so.
Tablet and other mobile PCs as well as smart cellphones have opened an uncounted number of ways for learners to use in and out of schools to learn-on-demand whatever they choose at the moment.
Learners know that educators have not figured out ways to monitor, assess, or manage these uses.
In the end, for learners, education means to use whatever tools, skills and information they have at the moment to adapt to their setting as they see it.
They don’t know which new learnings they will use to attain some other goal. Nor does any learner know precisely how that background will match what most others do, or how long that background will pay off for them individually in their longer future.
However, learners in classic education settings have more confidence about how their education will provide future openings unavailable to them through other venues.
Note: Cite references of this analysis of anomie among novices, in schooling, and its measured affect on learning rates to complement the discussion of its affects on decision points students use to participate in schooling.
Related Resources
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