The state of education, like the state of many other institutions
embodying characteristics of literacy-based practical
experiences, is far from what is expected. Literacy carried the
ideal of permanency into the practical experience of education.
In a physical world perceived as limited in scale and
fragmented, captive to sequentiality, characterized by periodic
changes and intercommunal commitments aimed at maintaining
permanency, literacy embodied both a goal and the means for
achieving it. It defined a representative, limited set of
choices. Within this structure, education is the practical
experience of stabilizing optimal modes of interaction centered
around values expressed in language. Education based on
literacy is adapted to the dynamics of change within the reduced
scale of humankind that eventually led to the formation of
nations-entities of relative self-sufficiency. Within national
boundaries, population growth, resources, and choices could be
kept in balance.
Purposely simplified, this view allows us to understand that
education evolved from its early stages-direct transmission of
experience from one person to another, from one generation to
another-to religion-based educational structures. Filtered by a
set of religious premises, education later opened a window beyond
the immediate and the proximity of life, and evolved, not
painlessly, into schools and universities concerned with
knowledge and scholarship.
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