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There's a long history behind education, types of it, and the reasons, rationales, and interests behind these. One of the better synopses of these I've found is Wes Cecil's "Myths of the Modern American Mind: Education" (61 minutes, audio only): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFiiOm6fB3c He traces the history back to Babylonia and scribal training, Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, medieval education, scholaticism and the rise of the Seven Liberal Arts with their Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and Quadrivium (Maths, Geometry, Music (or harmony) and Astronomy), the emergence of the modern physical and social sciences, and the Prussian Educational System which is the foundation of contemporary Western education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education Throughout virtually all of this there's been a sharp division between intellectual and technical education. The liberal arts were distinguished from the technical arts, also called Artes Mechanicae (mechanical arts), servile arts, or vulgar arts, originally: tailoring and weaving, agriculture, architecture and masonry, warfare and hunting, trade, cooking, and blacksmithing and metalurgy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_Mechanicae Since 1800 or so, the distinctions have largely been between pure skills, including trade, vocational, and technical skills (including STEM), professional training (law, medicine, military, religion, and general administration), and humanities or liberal arts. The relative prestige of these has shifted fairly markedly over this period, as well as the increased specialisation within academic curricula and programmes, with the University of Virginia offering eight fields of study in 1825, and Johns Hopkins University using the term "major" for the first time in 1877. The emergence of technical schools, such as M.I.T. (1861) with specialised courses of study helped drive this transformation. Cecil's treatment is on the light side, but engaging. John Stuart Mill's observations on the indoctrinational role of education are also interesting. As others have said, schools play multiple roles. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_... http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599 |