ABSTRACT
The distinguishing feature of twentieth-century educational study is the problem of the school. For it is only in the last, at most, 150 years that the problem of educating, what Dewey called the social necessity of life (Dewey, 1944), has been located in the formal institutions of schooling. This is a well-known story. In response to the multiple factors which mark the transition from a preindustrial to what Lawrence Cremin (1988) called a ‘metropolitan civilization,’ the need arose for an intentional institution which could perform the social, political, and economic tasks previously associated with a wide range of non-formal educational agencies. Importantly, one of the main, though not only, characteristics of metropolitan civilizations is the manner in which knowledge is stored in symbols. Thus, the school arises with the special purpose of transmitting symbolic knowledge, the working capital of modernity. This mission, the transmission of knowledge stored in symbols, has dominated what Thomas Green (1988) calls the public school movement since its inception. Against this standard, the effectiveness of schooling has been assessed around goals of attainment; what and how much symbolic knowledge is appropriate to each level of the system and how many get it?
