“The engagement to educate may … be hindered (and, indeed, in an important respect, utterly frustrated) by the belief that, although there may be a considerable inheritance of human understandings, sentiments, beliefs, etc., in terms of which a newcomer might be released from the grip of his immediate world and come to understand and identify himself as a civilized human being aware of standards of excellence in thought and conduct little or not at all reflected in the current enterprises and activities of that world, this identity is both distracting and ‘socially dangerous’. It distracts from the ordinary business of life and, since it is an identity not equally attainable by all, it is more apt to be socially ‘divisive’ than integrative. Hence, the apprenticeship of the newcomer to adult life should be an initiation, not into the grandeurs of human understanding, but into the skills, activities and enterprises which constitute the local world into which he is presently and actually born. The postulate to adult life is bidden to seek himself and to learn to enact himself in terms of an assigned or a self-chosen role in an association of fonctionnaires.

This I will call the substitution of ‘socialization’ for education. It is to be recognized as a frustration of the educational engagement and a destruction of ‘School’ because it attributes to the teaching and learning which comprise this apprenticeship an extrinsic ‘end’ or ‘purpose’, namely, the integration of the newcomer into a current ‘society’ recognized as the manifold of skills, activities, enterprises, understandings, sentiments and beliefs required to keep it going….”.

Michael Oakeshott (1972) “Education: The engagement and its frustration”, in R.F. Dearden, P.H. Hirst and R.S. Peters (eds.) Education and the development of reason, Volume 8, 2010 edition, London & New York: Routledge, pp. 14-36, p. 24-5.

Για την αντιγραφή, ν.κ.