Education and Egalitarianism in America :: American Education School Educators Essays

Education and Egalitarianism in America The American pedagogue Horace Mann once said As an apple is non in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated. Education is the process through which people endeavor to pass along to their boorren their hard-won wisdom and their aspirations for a better world. This process begins shortly after birth, as parents seek to train the infant to behave as their culture demands. They soon, for instance, discover the child how to turn babbling sounds into language and, through example and precept, they try to instill in the child the attitudes, values, skills, and knowledge that will govern their offsprings behavior throughout later(prenominal) life. Schooling, or formal education, consists of experiences that are deliberately planned and utilized to help young people learn what adults consider important for them to know and to help teach them how they should respon d to choices. This education has been influenced by three important parts of modern American society wisdom of the heart, egalitarianism, and practicality... the greatest of these, practicality. In the absence of written records, no one can be sure what education man first provided for his children. Most anthropologists believe, though, that the educational practices of prehistoric times were probably like those of primitive tribes in the 20th century, such as the Australian aborigines and the Aleuts. Formal instruction was probably given just before the childs initiation into adulthood -- the puberty rite -- and gnarled tribal customs and beliefs too complicated to be learn by direct experience. Children learned most of the skills, duties, customs, and beliefs of the tribe through an informal apprenticeship -- by victorious part in such adult activities as hunting, fishing, farming, toolmaking, and cooking. In such simple tribal societies, school was not a special place... it wa s life itself. However, the educational process has changed over the decades, and it now vaguely represents what it was in ancient times, or even in early American society. While the schools that the colonists established in the seventeenth century in the New England, Southern, and Middle colonies differed from one another, each reflected a concept of schooling that had been left behind in Europe. Most poor children learned through apprenticeship and had no formal schooling at all. Those who did go to elementary school were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion.