The important fact is that family life does educate, religious life does educate, and work does educate; and, what is more, the education of all three realms is as intentional as the education of the school, though in different ways and in different measures.

Every family has a curriculum, which it teaches quite deliberately and systematically over time. Every church and synagogue has a curriculum, which it teaches deliberately and systematically over time—the Old and New Testaments, after all, are among our oldest curricula, and so are the Missal and the Mass, and so is the Book of Common Prayer. And every employer has a curriculum, which he teaches deliberately and systematically over time; and the curriculum includes not only the technical skills of typing or welding or reaping or teaching but also the social skills of carrying out those activities in concert with others on given time schedules and according to established expectations and routines. One can go on to point out that libraries have curricula, museums have curricula, boyscout troops have curricula, and day-care centers have curricula, and most important, perhaps, radio and television stations have curricula—and by these curricula I refer not only to programs labeled educational but also to news broadcasts and documentaries (which presumably inform), to commercials (which teach people to want), and to soap operas (which reinforce common myths and values).

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.

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).

Now, permit me to go on to my third point, namely, the implications of this analysis for policymaking in education. I would put forward three assertions: first, that we have to think comprehensively about education; second, that we have to think relationally about education; and third, that we have to think publicly about education. Let me take each of these up in turn.

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.