ABSTRACT
There are significant limits to “school reform” as a strategy for improving the quality of academic achievement and personal development in low-income, low-status, and otherwise marginalized populations. It may be fallacious to define education as coterminous with schooling. In fact, the domain of education is life itself; schooling is but one of the educative institutions in human societies. Not only is it a limitation to consider education in terms of schooling alone, but it may in fact be erroneous to erect a kind of dualism between life and schooling, when schooling and other educative forces should be considered as a continuous process. I suggest that any effort to improve intellectual and personal development in marginalized populations must take a comprehensive approach to education, as effective education appears to be in most populations.
