A distinction can be made between schooling and education. Schooling, it seems to me, is linked to vocation and democratic participation. Those whom we school do not rock the boat; rather, they find work and generally function as productive members of society. The purpose of schooling is to train, sort, and generally allocate human resources to the work force so that one can maintain society as we know it. Schooling follows a societal script in which schedules are followed, assignments are made, and students tend to resist. It is what Mary Metz has called “Real School.” Schooling relies on external control in order to exist thriving on standards and test scores. So long as the purpose of school is to train, sort, and allocate very little in the way of critical thinking will take place.
On the other hand, schools can educate rather than simply school. When education is the purpose, teaching and learning take on a very different hue. Education has as its foundational purpose to fundamentally challenge one’s taken-for-granteds. When the purpose is to cause one to think, to take on investigations that focus on possibilities rather than on facts or truths, then one unleashes a fundamental examination of beliefs that may rise to great creative heights.
To be complacent is to allow oneself to be schooled. Education requires an aggressive approach to learning and therefore teaching, one that does not allow for complacency, to the contrary, it requires active participation in a process of thinking that, like the genie, once set free cannot be put back in the bottle.
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