Education and Socialization. Crisis and Confusion

July 29th, 2008 Posted in Education

Formal education in schools is part of the larger process of socialization. We are constantly learning to fit into our groups and societies. This is a consistent part of what we know. School is merely a standardized sector in this larger experience. The socialization process is especially striking in early childhood when the infant picks up the particular forms of speech and association of the group within which it has been born and accepted.

It is hard not to assume that an informal training regime is always present for all of us. Though it flows in all directions, whether acknowledged or not, its backbone is age graded. Instruction goes from adult to child, from older to younger. It follows the requirements of biological growth. (But it may go the other way as well especially for new technologies and new experiences). Criss-crossing is a same (shared age) generation pattern that emerges where people at the same level of experience in age or in historical incident or in shared unique local events learn from each other and evolve their own way.

This learning is part of our constant interaction with each other. Whatever the context (commercial, kinship, sociability, technical, etc.) there is usually a subtext concerning the correctness of the way we are behaving. As we age our accumulated knowledge might stabilize and make us more conservative. The younger people are more available for the new. But the possibility of learning and changing never ends.

Outside of the direct human interaction edge of socialization we have the more abstract yet farther reaching media like print, picture and electronic messages that offer us a constant modern stream of information, opinion and attitude. This is another level of socialization influence.

What we learn first of all is tradition–the established ways of culture and social organization. You do not choose your language, you simply accept the one that is presented to you. We learn from and carry on the wisdom (or sometimes nonsense) of the past. But we also are constantly amending the old and inventing the new. There is a continuing shift over time and generations in the content of our ways of doing and being.

The school (the formal education, the curriculum, the institution of education) grows out of, and has been imposed upon, the larger socialization process that is the universal and basic educative experience. Go back in time for any culture-carrying group and you reach a moment when there were no formal schools. Socialization is basic, education is derivative.

The association of the school and the formal education with advanced knowledge and the presumption that the pre-literate society (or person) is rude and ignorant is an over generalization. These peoples (go back and we are all included here) had complex languages and social organizations. They had developed religions and philosophies with myths and stories, a sense of history, knowledge of their environments, skilled crafts.

In previous centuries pre-literate African tribal doctors successfully treated Euro visitors who were sick or injured. Modern anthropologists search out pre-literate tribal specialists for insights and lore concerning the medicinal properties of plants and natural products. Technical knowledge of crafts and architectural forms and artistic achievements of pre-literates have been collected and preserved in our museums. Ishi, the last totally unacculturated Amerindian in the USA gave craft demonstrations in a California museum.

As usual, I am exaggerating by not mentioning the astonishing achievements of the formal educational system worldwide. But it is in the service of finding another viewpoint for the persistent, apparently unsolvable, crisis in America’s educational institution–an issue that does not go away despite the interest and political action of our governing regime.

Doesn’t is seem strange when formal education is seen in isolation, separated from the larger socialization process of which it is a late arriving imposed part?