{"id":1576,"date":"2013-09-15T19:06:12","date_gmt":"2013-09-15T19:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iamlearner.net\/?p=1576"},"modified":"2013-09-15T19:06:12","modified_gmt":"2013-09-15T19:06:12","slug":"education-not-a-fixed-abstraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iamlearner.net\/blog\/education-not-a-fixed-abstraction\/","title":{"rendered":"Education: not a fixed abstraction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n\tIn his book The Long Revolution, in&nbsp;a chapter on &lsquo;Education and Society&rsquo;, Williams wrote:&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\n\t\t&hellip;we speak sometimes as if education were a fixed abstraction, a settled body of teaching and learning, and as if the only problem it presents to us is that of distribution: this amount, for this period of time, to this or that group.\n\t<\/p>\n<p>\n\t\t&hellip;to conduct the business [of education] as if it were the distribution of a simple product is wholly misleading.\n\t<\/p>\n<p>\n\t\t&hellip;what has been thought of as a simple distrubution is in fact an active shaping to particular social ends.\n\t<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\n\tThe way in which we organise education, the particular structure our education system has taken, the shape of our curriculum, the specific selection of content we choose to &lsquo;deliver&rsquo; through that curriculum &ndash; all these and more are not timeless abstractions, but particular to the social, political and economic context in which we construct and operate an education system.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThis, of course, comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever thought seriously about education, about its purpose and about the way it is organized&nbsp;in different societies. Nonetheless, it is good to be reminded that education has two key functions. They are:\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n\t\tto reflect the society we live in, and;\n\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\tto reproduce the society we live in.\n\t<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\n\tWhich of the two we might regard as the more dominant at any one point in time will depend on our ideological standpoint.&nbsp;Tensions arise when our education system no longer reflects our society, when changes in society happen too quickly for our education system to keep up. That, I believe, is the situation we are in today.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tAnd what if our education system continues to seek the reproduction of a society that no longer exists? If social relations are changing, if our vision of a future society is different from what has been before, and indeed if the very nature of what it means to be educated is changing, as I believe it is,&nbsp;how do we ensure that education is set up to help us get there, rather than drag us in the opposite direction?\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tChanging practice in the classroom (micro-level change?) is one thing, but changing the very nature of our education system (macro-level change?) to reflect and (re-)produce the society we seek is a very different beast altogether.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his book The Long Revolution, in&nbsp;a chapter on &lsquo;Education and Society&rsquo;, Williams wrote:&nbsp; &hellip;we speak sometimes as if education were a fixed abstraction, a settled body of teaching and learning, and as if the only problem it presents to us is that of distribution: this amount, for this period of time, to this or&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13,1,6,4],"tags":[131,20,218,217,216],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iamlearner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iamlearner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iamlearner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iamlearner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iamlearner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1576"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/iamlearner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1580,"href":"https:\/\/iamlearner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions\/1580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iamlearner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iamlearner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iamlearner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}