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September 06, 2007
Schooling vs. Education
Categories: EDUC 110
It's easy to confuse the two, but one way to think about it is schooling is a subset of education. Education is an activity undertaken by a group to make sure the group survives past the lifetime of it's present members. Each group has it's own methods of educating. If you join a fraternity or sorority, for example, you are taught about the group's history, goals, traditions, etc so that after all the current members have graduated you can continue the life of the group. Some of this education takes place explicitly, while other aspects of it are more hidden.
You can think of "society" as being one big mega-group. It tries to educate its members in a variety of ways -- the family educates, the church educates, the media educates, and schools educate.
Schools are the explicit educational arm of society -- the social institution charged with educating the young so that society can continue. Those other members of society that educate do so as part of their other functions, but education is the explicit function of school.
The four goals of schooling apply, well, to schooling. Schools have an academic goal, a personal goal, etc. All of these are subsets of the larger educational goal of schooling. When we talk about the conservative and reconstructive goals of education, however, they can be seen as broadly applying to any social group that educates. They apply particularly well to schools because schools are the social institution that has education as its primary and explicit goal.
Posted by Nakia at September 6, 2007 03:14 PM