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A overall statement about education as constitutive of humanity at moments of disruption within the routine flow of time–whether these disruptions are the product of “external” events or of internal “contradictions.”

A return to the classic issues about humanistic education where longer sequences are at play and the field of participants cannot be specified (e.g. “education into family life” or “religion”). This requires that categories such as “family” generally presented in structural(-functional) terms be re-presented as temporal sequences that are genetic (if one knows a kind of beginning one knows a kind of end) and also in on-going evolution. That is, to the extent that something will happen after the beginning of a sequence that will threaten its orderly unfolding (“reproduction”), one must be concerned with the activities that will attempt either to insure the reproduction (“reconstruction”) or to institutionalize the transformation (“revolution”?). These are the activities that I will argue are above all educational.
a. In this perspective, schooling is “educational” at the level national polities
i. First to the extent that, early in its history it was the product of a deliberative process that produced an institution designed to disrupt earlier reproductive patterns,
ii. Second to the extent that, after it has been well established (say as it now occurs in Euro-America) it involves a continually reformed attempt to reproduce itself (its authority, personnel, methods of recruitment, etc.)