ABSTRACT
Education does not occur in a vacuum. It begins with different and often unstated “preanalytic” cultural assumptions about how, why, and what people learn and the kind of aptitudes and skills necessary to support and pass on a particular kind of society—whether theocratic, democratic, industrial, or what is now being called sustainable. The specific goals of education and the art and science of instruction further depend a great deal on whether those being educated are presumed to be empty vessels to be filled with knowledge or to have inborn qualities that can be drawn out and disciplined. In general, pre-collegiate and collegiate education in the United States was modeled on the former belief: that people are born ignorant and so must be improved in order to increase public virtue, support democracy, provide the skills necessary for economic growth, and more recently serve the information economy and the development of high and ever higher technology. That model has become dominant virtually everywhere.
