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

Education and Egalitarianism in America The American educator Horace Mann once said As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a hu humanskind 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 children their hard-won wisdom and their aspirations for a better world. This process begins shortly afterwards birth, as parents seek to train the infant to behave as their culture demands. They soon, for instance, t each(prenominal) the child how to turn babbling sounds into language and, through example and precept, they campaign to instill in the child the attitudes, values, skills, and knowledge that will govern their offsprings behavior throughout later life. Schooling, or formal education, consists of experiences that are deliberately planned and apply to help young people learn what adults consider important for them to know and to help teach them how they should respond to choices. This education has been influenced by three important move 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 development was probably given just before the childs initiation into adulthood -- the puberty rite -- and involved tribal customs and beliefs too complicated to be knowing by direct experience. Children learned most of the skills, duties, customs, and beliefs of the tribe through an informal apprenticeship -- by taking part in such adult activities as hunting, fishing, farming, toolmaking, and cooking. In such simple tribal societies, school was not a special pla ce... it was life itself. However, the educational process has changed over the decades, and it now vaguely represents what it was in past times, or even in early American society. While the schools that the colonists established in the 17th 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.