The American educator Horace Mann once said: As an apple is not in any proper
sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a
human being until he is educated. Education is the process through which people
endeavor to pass along to their children their hard-won wisdom and their
aspirations for a better world. This process begins shortly after birth, as
parents seek to train the infant to behave as their culture demands.
They soon, for instance, teach the child how to turn babbling sounds into
language and, through example and precept, they try to instill in the child the
attitudes, values, skills, and knowledge that will govern their offspring's
behavior throughout later life. Schooling, or formal education, consists of
experiences that are deliberately planned and utilized to help young people
learn what adults consider important for them to know and to help teach them how
they should respond to choices.
This education has been influenced by three important parts of modern
American society: wisdom of the heart, egalitarianism, and practicality... the
greatest of these, practicality. In the absence of written records, no one can
be sure what education man first provided for his children. Most anthropologists
believe, though, that the educational practices of prehistoric times were
probably like those of primitive tribes in the 20th century, such as the
Australian aborigines and the Aleuts.
Formal instruction was probably given just before the child's initiation into
adulthood -- the puberty rite -- and involved tribal customs and beliefs too
complicated to be learned by direct experience. Children learned most of the
skills, duties, customs, and beliefs of the tribe through an informal
apprenticeship -- by taking part in such adult activities as hunting, fishing,
farming, toolmaking, and cooking.
In such simple tribal societies, school was not a special place... it was
life itself. However, the educational process has changed over the decades, and
it now vaguely represents what it was in ancient times, or even in early
American society. While the schools that the colonists established in the 17th
century in the New England, Southern, and Middle colonies differed from one
another, each reflected a concept of schooling that had been left behind in
Europe. Most poor children learned through apprenticeship and had no formal
schooling at all.
