ABSTRACT
The institutions of education are so pervasive and the problems raised by these institutions are so pressing that to escape from their everydayness is nearly impossible. The danger to an educator, or a would-be educator, is that he will be socialized into the existing institutions or into the language generated by them. One cannot be socially critical as a positivist. That which is, a consequence of historical conditions that may not exist today, is not necessarily what should or could be. To answer questions derived from dated institutions or framed by limited ways of speaking is to limit the imagination and the future. To honor a question does not entail answering the question, but responding to the situation that is the source of the question. To honor an institution or the people associated with an institution does not require maintaining the institution or the behavior of the people; instead, it is an articulation of the time and place of their origin, the time and place of today, and the discrepancies or contradictions that prevail between the two times and the two places. We do not honor educators, their language, and their institutions by accepting at face value the concerns and problems that they generate. We honor them by indicating how these concerns derive from historical commitments and how these problems are a consequence of new technical and political conditions. In the everyday talk of educators, the phenomena of education have been too closely associated with the institutions of schooling and the language of learning. Schools are a necessary social construction, and learning is a necessary intellectual construct. In discussing education, we should not be limited to these two constructs; nor should our discussion ignore them.
