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).
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