Many people confuse education and schooling. The difference is huge. Education is an ideal. Schools are institutions set up to formalise teaching. Schools need not be educational at all, and often aren’t. Indeed, they can indoctrinate. It is the ethical concern of education for learning to live well that is lost when the two are confused
When I was in teacher training, and later went on to study education more extensively, I was occasionally puzzled; being confused about the difference between education and schooling, or the relationship between these concepts. That should sound bad. How could someone devote all that time and energy to studying education/schooling, and spending time as a teacher without knowing the difference, or the relationship? That surely didn’t bode well.
But in all that training and higher learning, it wasn’t even mentioned, except in passing, and not discussed enough for anything to become clear. Eventually, in one course in graduate school, it was addressed at length. But that was a course in philosophy of education. I went further in philosophy of education, and attention to that concept turned my world on its head. But then, philosophy isn’t practical, is it?
Google searches on questions like “what is the difference between education and schooling?”, and “what is education?” number in the tens of thousands a month. So maybe, if I was peculiar in my lack of understanding, I am nevertheless in the company of quite a number of other peculiar people.
It is a sad indictment of what has become of the meaning of education in popular usage that there could be any confusion at all. It is worse than if the idea of “transportation” was reduced to the idea of a bicycle, when there are other means of transportation. Odd as even that would be, both “transportation” and “bicycles” are means of getting about, whereas, though schooling is some sort of means to various learning ends, “education ” isn’t a means at all. It is an end in itself.
This confusion and debasement is a consequence of a kind of propaganda. Education has always been a very valuable and worthwhile thing, and hence if you call something “education”, and people are innocent enough to accept it, you freight that thing with the value that education is understood to have. This is what has happened to schooling. Whether schools are doing anything valuable or not, calling them “education” attaches approval to them. If we buy in to this trick, we absorb some of the smuggled value, which helps those who are promoting whatever agendas they have for schools.
“Education” and “schooling” are quite different conceptual categories, and if people find it difficult to distinguish them, that really needs to be explained. It isn’t obvious, for instance, that people have the same problem distinguishing between the idea of justice and the idea of a court. People usually seem aware that courts don’t always dispense justice, even if justice is held up as an ideal, and they know that whole judicial systems can be unjust – in tyrannies, for example. More than that, they know that the domain of justice extends far beyond whatever could be dealt with by a judicial system – that issues of justice arise on personal life, in politics – indeed in every aspect of our lives together.
Education and schooling stand in just the same relation. For some reason, we call things “educational” much more indiscriminately than we call things “just”, and we do so as if there is little at stake – as compared with justice. I have already suggested, in a former post on indoctrination, that this may be because we have such a weak sensitivity to education – to what can go wrong. We don’t worry about indoctrination the way we worry about injustice. We rarely, for instance, take to the streets about it, or take people to court, or countries to the international courts as we do over justice. It is worrisome that we don’t get so upset about it, because justice and education share a deep mutual dependency. We often talk about schooling not being educational, but it usually remains just talk. When the talk finally reaches the point of action, it tends to reduce to talk about the fact that students aren’t learning the existing curriculum very well, and too many are falling behind. It isn’t, in other words, an effective discussion about education at all.
Typically, these attempts to distinguish education from schooling fail, not because the people offering their thoughts don’t know what schooling is – that is the easy part – because we all went through school and are quite well aware of it. They fail and flounder when it comes to giving an account of education.
A common approach is to give a list of qualities a person should possess. These lists can be quite long, and contain all kinds of good things – like critical thinking, creativity, initiative, humility, freedom of thought, good judgement and action, creativity, spontaneity, innovation, wisdom, how to find “knowledge” for yourself.
Such lists often contain ideas that are educationally important, but they fail for two reasons.
The first is that they are too far down the chain of justification. We need to know why these things are important. One sense we can get from reading the sites is that there are just so many ideas about what education means that we might as well throw in the towel over the whole enterprise. If everyone has a different opinion, then we aren’t going to reach agreement. This will mean that we can’t make educational decisions together, we aren’t going to be able to agree on what is important, and we may as well leave the whole thing to whichever bunch of rascals win out with their personal agendas.
Education is too important to be left like this. We need to reach agreement at some more fundamental level – agreement about what is of primary importance to us all. Then when we spell out the implications to the point that we come to items that might be on lists like this, we need to know what ones matter, why they matter, and where they are likely to turn up as important in our practice. We need to know if some are more important than others. We also need to know if some shouldn’t be there at all, and how that should be decided. We need a coordinated, consistent point of view that ties them all together. An educational point of view.
Suppose we take the above list; critical thinking, creativity, initiative, humility, freedom of thought, good judgement and action, creativity, spontaneity, innovation, wisdom. Suppose we get together a bunch of truly evil people, and we enhance their abilities in all these areas. Would that be a smart thing to do? O.K., on some interpretations of “wisdom”, they would have to become “good people”, but only if that is carefully built into our understanding of “wisdom”, and carefully distinguished from “cunning” or “smart”. The same applies to “good judgement”. Does that entail being morally good? “Humility”, too, might be out of place – except that you might be better at your evil if you were truly aware of your limits and willing to learn.
On the whole, though, developing evil people along the lines of the list would just make them more effective and powerful in their evil. Is that what we have in mind? We need more careful explanation and discrimination, and that is why, in the “Ethical Manifesto” post, and in my other writings, I go back, time and again, to the intrinsic worth of the person, and work that out in terms of mutual respect and the duty to oneself. Work these things out, and you will get the importance of most of the things on the list and what it is that they contribute – with a clearer ability to judge what we don’t want them to mean. You will also get a clearer idea of the issues of living in which they are likely to be important.
The Second problem with lists like this is that they are too vague to apply well. Teachers or educational planners will very likely say of such lists that they develop these things all the time in most things they do. If you ask them to point out where, they will point to things like reading and literature, social studies and history, or group work – that is, they will be equally vague, because there is nothing at stake over the items in the list. Look closely at the evidence and you will find that these things are very much more poorly implemented than, say, mathematics.
I don’t want to get reduced to questions of measurement, but we should be able to be shown exactly where the thing is being developed, in what form, by what process. We should see some evidence of its being developed there, how its elements hang together with other elements, and through what sorts of practices. We should be able to see that it is being demonstrated in and out of the educational setting. We should be able to tell, by what we see, just how important it is actually considered to be. This sort of appraisal might be very informal, but it has to be real.
A Second sort of list doesn’t focus on personal qualities but on areas of life. Citizenship, democracy and jobs appear quite often. Thus a Purpose of School site http://www.purposeofschool.com/philosophical/ quotes Mortimore Adler’s list (for schooling) of:
the development of citizenship,
personal growth or self-improvement, and
occupational preparation.
It also quotes another list from deMarrais and LeCompte (also for schooling):
intellectual purposes such as the development of mathematical and reading skills;
political purposes such as the assimilation of immigrants;
economic purposes such as job preparation; and
social purposes such as the development of social and moral responsibility.
These sorts of lists immediately raise the spectre of some people moulding others according to their agendas. Immediately, we should ask of each item, the degree to which the learner is really being put first here, or are they being subordinated to the supposed interests of some group, however well meaning. The last on the list has a horrible ambiguity to it, for instance. It very much looks as if the learner is to develop social and moral responsibility to please others (a “social purpose”) rather than for their own sake. Is it social control or is it to be done out of a full respect for the learner? To what degree in this process will the learner be free to choose their own understanding of their “moral responsibility”? What will count as success, and what will count as failure?
Is job preparation going to open the learner up to the critical sociology of work? What could be going on under the heading of “political purposes such as the assimilation of immigrants”? It is essential that such lists only come into existence downstream of solid ethical principles that protect the intrinsic worth of the learner, and that when these items are interpreted, that protection is fully displayed, and followed through into educational practice.
Preparation to “be good citizens”, and preparation “for democracy” require a lot of attention before they can become a part of any genuine educational purpose. The first indoctrination debate, which did so much to establish our educational meaning of “indoctrination” occurred in the US in the 1930s as a debate over the political indoctrination in Soviet schools – teaching for a commitment to the Soviet communism of the Stalinist system. It was not long before the question was raised and the worry began about whether there could be a parallel form of indoctrination – teaching for a commitment to American democracy.
Given that the thing that we call democracy in our modern Western states is such a poor expression of democratic ideas, and riddled with corrupting powers and influences, there is nothing educational about the idea that some people should decide that others should be brought up to be committed to it. Indeed, this is precisely a recipe for sustaining and embedding all of the things that are bad about these systems. The very idea of pre-empting the decisions of the next generation in this way is, itself, fundamentally undemocratic. The whole area collapses readily into social control.
Very fine lines, carefully protected, must be drawn through these whole areas, and again, the only way to draw such lines is to go back and look more closely at the ethical relationships among individuals of equal intrinsic worth, and ask the proper learning questions about those individuals and their relationships.
Another theme that arises again and again when people try to distinguish education from schooling, or identify the purpose or meaning of education is that education should have to do with life, and that much of it involves life beyond the school. Here we often see people sceptical of the value of schooling, or at least conscious of its very real limitations.
But this idea too, is too vaguely developed, and as such it could never gain much traction on policy or practice.
In the first place, if education is to be about life, what is it about life, precisely, that we should be trying to achieve? We are not even beginning to address this in those initiatives about life skills, which concern themselves with how to manage a bank account, or read a rental agreement, or even look after your health. These are little more than the mechanics of life and represent no challenge to educational “business as usual”. We would need to look more closely at the real, painful and difficult issues of good living, of living well.
Secondly, the world outside the school – where “real” life takes place – is hardly a benevolent educational environment. It is riddled with indoctrination, manipulation, uneven and often illegitimate power structures and with the possibilities of some very, very bad experiences, both in public and in private life. That means that it is hardly a very educational environment.
To negotiate it, and to learn the best from experience in it, we need some sort of educational judgment, because we are going to have to take charge of our own education out there.
Without that judgment we are just as likely to learn bad things as good things, to become lesser people rather than greater people. The experience that we gain as we age may not be to our good at all. If you maintain a rosy picture that all this automatically goes well, just take a closer look at many of those people out there. It is because we know this often doesn’t go at all well that so many of those people are asking, in the first place, for education to be a preparation for life, rather than the relatively irrelevant thing that parades in its name.
And here’s the rub. We need educational judgment in order to get the right “lessons” about life, and from life, so the idea that education should be about life doesn’t get us very far toward understanding what “education” should mean, though it represents a worthwhile impulse. We need, firstly, to make some serious value judgments about living, and we need to use these judgments to identify learning that matters.
What is the difference between education and schooling?
Description
The difference between education and schooling is huge. Education is an ideal. Schools are institutionalized means to learning, and often aren't educational
Many people confuse education and schooling. The difference is huge. Education is an ideal. Schools are institutions set up to formalise teaching. Schools need not be educational at all, and often aren’t. Indeed, they can indoctrinate. It is the ethical concern of education for learning to live well that is lost when the two are confused 
