Schooling
From Studyplace
How do schools educate? What determines how they work? Does schooling educate with lasting effect? How?
- Are public leaders and educational professionals paying too much attention to the operations of schools and too little to the substance of schooling?
By law, most societies require children to participate in schooling, usually for ten years, up to the age of sixteen.
- Over this sustained period, what are the major accomplishments that young persons can acquire through school? Should acquire through school? Do acquire through school?
- In this process, what is the purpose of periodically assessing how cohorts perform on tests of selected content? Is it to ensure that some proportion of the cohort can add and subtract, or read and write at a certain level of proficiency? Or do assessments establish something else? If so, what? And in any case, can researchers systematically investigate how assessments help to educate the person? How?
Do schools educate? Miseducate? When? Where? Who? How? Why? Wherefore? The habitual shortcut treats schools as places for teaching and learning. Year by year in schools, teachers teach a curriculum, with a set scope and sequence, to cohort after cohort of pupils and students. to facilitate learning what teachers teach, schools intentionally group students by age, and often with a mix of intention and accident, by other extrinsics such as gender, religion, class, race, or ethnicity. The culture epitome passes, in a perennial recurrence, from teaching through learning. Are scores measuring what parts of it a student has or has not learned, from one part of the scope and at some step in the sequence, evidence that the school is educating? What attests that evidenced learning serves as a valid warrant for having educated a person?
