Needless to say, this vision was very far from the realities of most people on the planet, mainly in the so-called global south, who were still not accessing schools or universities. In this heyday of middle-class growth and rapid economic expansion, education was seen as one part of the conventional pathway that many would follow to a tranquil retirement. The vision of the 1950s was one whereby an education would stop after high school or, perhaps university, when young people would be recruited by firms, sometimes literally right after their graduation ceremonies and a long career could be expected to ensue. The economic boom of the post-World War II era made the previously inaccessible pathway of a university education a more popular and accessible option, at least in the so-called Western world. Education was used to forge nation-state identity across millions of people. The structure of the ancient world was fiercely hierarchical and elitist when it came to any sort of formal education: those who could read and write were scribes, priests, and leaders.Ĭompulsory education brought to the fore the democratisation of education and, with it, the more standardised model whereby every child would be expected to know a certain number of things: the dates and names of their national history, core elements of literacy and numeracy, and scientific facts. Powerful, arcane knowledge was placed in the hands of the few and these few were venerated for this. While this notion is as old as the hills and incorporates many formal and informal dimensions of learning to this day, the way that learning has been conceptualised through different historical paradigms has changed quite significantly.īefore the onset of compulsory education in the 19th Century, an educated person was someone privileged to be part of a small group of initiates or royalty. The idea is that the educational process leads you out of your former self into a new self: more knowledgeable, more skilled, wiser, and more experienced. The Latin root of the word educate is “exducere”: to lead out of. But what does it mean to be educated in 2022?
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