School Education

"School Education"

When American's think off school education, they almost automatically think of public education. Through the years school education is slowly changing, and education in public school has been on the slope for over twenty years. School education has lost all values and biblical morality. This was what our country was founded on and it has been replaced with humanism. This paper will take a look at how school education can be defined and how a school education should be. What should a school education do for its citizens and what are its responsibilities?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary one of the definitions of the word education is: The systematic instruction, schooling or training given to the young students in preparation for the work of life, by extension, similar instruction or training obtained in adult age, also the whole course of scholastic instruction which a person has received. Although this an accurate description of what an actual education may be, there is a great more to the process of becoming educated than the actual instruction and schooling one may receive.

School education is the skills acquired while being brought up, which can often prove more useful in real life than can twenty years of gaining knowledge in a high school or college situation. Education for most people should begin outside of the classroom. A better word one should consider is knowledge, or perhaps knowledge of information. Once a person can take his nuggets of information and apply them to everyday things then that person can consider himself/herself educated.

Importantly, American advocates of compulsory state schooling observed the Prussian system, became enamored of it, and adopted it as their model. As a former teacher, John Taylor Gatto writes that a small number of very passionate American leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century. They fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency of its education system; and campaigned relentlessly thereafter to bring the Prussian vision to America (154). The American educationists imported three major ideas major ideas from Prussia. The first was that the purpose of state schooling was not intellectual training but the conditioning of children to ensure obedience, subordination, and collective life. Secondly, whole ideas were broken and school days were divided into fixed periods so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions. Third, the state was posited as the true parent of our children.

Jean Anyon described five samples of schools, where the income, occupation, and other relevant social characteristics of the students and their parents indentified the level of school education received. The first two schools are described as working-class schools. Most of the parents have unskilled of semiskilled jobs. The income of the majority of the families is at or below twelve thousand a year. The third school is called the middle-class school. The parents are skilled well-paid worker with income between thirteen and twenty five thousand. The fourth school is called the affluent professional school. The parents are well educated with income between forty and eighty thousand. In the fifth school the majority of the families belong to the capitalist class. This school is called the executive school because most of the fathers are executives. The incomes are over one hundred thousand (175-176).

Jonathan