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Education
How are schools seen as an intellectual agency?
As early as the ancient Greeks, education has been seen as a vehicle or agency for producing certain types of people, and furthering certain types of knowledge (Cahn, 1997). Education is not as simple as 'reading, writing, and arithmetic.' The process of education is not a neutral process, and thus schools are not neutral agencies. What is assumed to constitute an educated individual has varied considerably over time, as has the possibility of educating everyone in the same fashion. For example, societal institutions, like democracy, have affected the ability of individuals to have access to public education. The content of quality of education may vary in the public vs. The private schools. If children in the public schools are prepared for 'useful' trades, while children in private schools learn classical languages, literature, and history, this 'says' something about how society prioritizes certain information for particular social classes. Inequality in education determines different groups of children's divergent futures, and how society will look in the future. Denying certain individuals access to education at all, in a society that privileges literacy, also creates a societal imbalance and social inequality, as manifested in the examples of Frederick Douglass in America (Gutek, 2005).
Consider in our own contemporary public schools, how even simple actions taken for granted like pledging allegiance to the flag affirms the value of citizenship, how demarcating winter break as a time of rest reinforces the importance of Judeo-Christian holidays, and the content of the textbooks used determines what the child will later consider 'American history' or 'Great Literature.' Editing out certain authors or entire groups of people from the body of knowledge transmitted in a nation's schools creates an exclusionary message of what is intellectually valuable that the child will carry within his or her set of core assumptions, possibly forever.
Works Cited
Cahn, Steven M. 1997. Classic and contemporary readings in the philosophy of education. New York: McGraw-Hill
Gutek, Gerald L. 2005. Historical and philosophical foundations of education: A biographical introduction. 4th ed. Merrill/Prentice Hall.
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