pages 27-30

I HAVE FOUND IT fruitful to define education as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, or sensibilities, as well as any outcomes of that effort. The definition stresses intentionality, though I am well aware that learning takes place in many situations where intentionality is not present. It makes room for study as well as instruction, thereby embracing the crucial realm of self-education. And it acknowledges that behavior, preferences, and tastes are involved, as well as knowledge and understanding. It sees education as a process more limited than what the sociologist would call socialization or the anthropologist enculturation, though obviously in-clusive of many of the same phenomena. And it recognizes that there is often conflict between what educators are trying to teach and what is learned from the ordinary business of living.[1]

The definition is latitudinarian, in that it permits us several angles of vision with respect to the interplay of generations. Education may be viewed as intergenerational, with adults teaching children (the historian Bernard Bailvn once defined education as "the entire process by which culture transmits it-self across the generations") or with children teaching adults one thinks of immigrant families in which children, having learned the new culture relatively rapidly, become its interpreters to parents and grandparents); it may be viewed as intragenerational (recall Robert F. Berkhofer's account of Protestant missions to the American Indians in Salvation and the Savage [1965], which makes such apt use of the concept of acculturation); or it may be viewed as a self-conscious coming of age (so often the leitmotif of the reflective memoir or autobiography).[2]

The definition also projects us beyond the schools and colleges to the multiplicity of individuals and institutions that educate—parents, peers, siblings, and friends, as well as families, churches, synagogues, libraries, museums, summer camps, benevolent societies, agricultural fairs, settlement houses, factories, radio stations, and television networks. It alerts us to the numerous occupational groups (only some of which have been professionalized) associated with educational institutions and to the variety of pedagogies they employ. And it suggests the fact that each of these pedagogies tends at a given time to impinge on the others. Thus, revivalist preaching doubtless influenced familial instruction in the nineteenth century, while Sesame Street unquestionably influences kindergarten instruction in our own.

Finally, the definition grants that education ordinarily (though not necessarily) produces outcomes, some of which may be intended and some unintended, and indeed that the unintended outcomes may be more significant than the in-tended. It also grants that other phenomena, from politics to commerce to technology to earthquakes, may produce even more significant changes in understanding, behavior, or sensibility than education. There are some who would consider all such phenomena educative, for they invariably shape human beings and affect their destinies. I find their definition so inclusive as to be meaningless. We obviously learn many things that no one sets out to teach us and that we ourselves do not set out to learn. No one interested in education can afford to ignore such incidental learning, but to call it education is to blur and confuse that critical realm of human activity in which individuals seek purposefully and planfully to bring about changes in their own or others' thinking, behavior, or sensibilities.
Every day in every part of the world people set out to teach something to others or to study something themselves (or to place others or themselves in situations from which they hope desirable changes in knowledge, attitudes, skills, or appreciations will result). They deserve a theory specifically addressed to their problems and purposes, one that will assist them to act more intelligently, ever hopeful of the possibilities but fully aware of the limitations and risks that attend their efforts.

Footnote 1: The substance of this essay appeared initially as "Notes Toward a Theory of Education," Notes on Education, no. 1 (June 1973): 4-6, and "Further Notes Toward a Theory of Education," Notes on Education, no. 4 (March 1974): 1-6. For the numerous current definitions and interpretations of socialization, see David A. Goslin, ed., Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969). For similar perspectives on enculturation, see John J. Honigmann, ed., Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973), chap. 25, and Francis L. K. Hsu, ed., Psychological Anthropology, new ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenckman, 1972).

Footnote 2: Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), p. 14. The educational tension in the immigrant family is portrayed in Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), chap. 9. Margaret Mead uses the concept of the "immigrant in time" to dramatize the extent to which modern children, who are more adaptable to changing conditions than their parents and grandparents, end up having to interpret novelty to their parents and grandparents. See Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (New York: The Natural History Press, 1970), chap. 3.