Hervé Varenne
Teachers College, Columbia University
I gave two versions of this lecture, first at Stanford University in February 2004, and then at Berkeley in April 2004. Much of these lectures was identical. The main differences lie in the initial framing.
I have conceived of education in this essay as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, or sensibilities, and any learning that results from the effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended. This definition obviously projects inquiry beyond the schools and colleges to a host of individuals and institutions that educate - parents, peers, siblings, and friends, as well as families, churches, synagogues, libraries, museums, settlement houses, and factories. And it clearly focuses attention on the relationships among the several educative institutions and on the effects of one institution's efforts on those of another. What is needed most for a sound historical understanding of these relationships -- or linkages, as I have called them here -- is a variety of investigations that study them in their own right, with explicit educational questions uppermost in mind...
(Cremin 1978: 701).