ABSTRACT

As Chapter 1 has suggested, ideas around the “schooled society” and the ideological functions of pedagogy have influenced educational philosophy and practice from earliest times. This chapter takes a historical materialist approach to the vocabulary of learning/schooling/education in the tradition of Raymond Williams’s Keywords (Williams 1983). 1 Developing argument in more depth than the preceding chapter it consists of four mini-essays on: schooling, world schooling, pedagogicisation, and informal/semi-formal learning. Clarifying these terms, their definitions and use helps us understand some of the assumption made about schools, education and learning in different countries around the world and will help establish a context for the chapters that follow. These terms, and the concepts and practices they describe, are often used in a confusing fashion especially when the same term is “translated” from one country to another. Given that this book as a whole deals with a series of ideologically laden concepts, our aim here is to offer as wide a frame of reference as possible to deal with the history and, at times, plural meanings that attach to our understandings of education. The fundamental premise behind this chapter is that everyday terms – even simple ones, like learning, education or schools – carry within them complex attitudes towards the relationship of social structure to individual agency and can imply different understandings about epistemology and the human mind. The language we use to label and describe key concepts from a comparative international perspective demands sustained attention.