To Teach or to Educate, That Is the Question

Jacques Barzun begins his invaluable book Teacher in America by making the following distinction between the terms "teaching" and "education":

The business of the citizen and the statesman is not political theory but politics. The business of the parent and the teacher is not education but Teaching. Teaching is something that can be provided for, changed, or stopped. It is good or bad, brilliant or stupid, plentiful or scarce. [...] Education is obviously something else, something intangible, unpredictable. Education comes from within; it is a man's own doing, or rather it happens to him--sometimes because of the teaching he has had, sometimes in spite of it.

Barzun's distinction is especially worth noting now that most people--teachers, alas, included--use the terms "teaching" and "educating" interchangeably and therefore obscure the meaning of both. Is it any wonder then that so little actual teaching and so little education actually take place in our schools? (It has become common to place the adjective "public" before "schools" when criticizing what goes on in the classroom, but it is my contention that nowadays there is little difference between what goes on in public schools and what goes on in most other kinds, at least insofar as those in charge of shaping the policies of either breathe more or less the same intellectually impoverished air. While it is still true that the average private- or parochial-school student comes from a "better environment" and therefore tends to come equipped with more "cultural capital" and to behave better, he wastes nearly as much of his time and energy in classes taught by teachers who, their good intentions notwithstanding, have either forgotten or never known how actual learning takes place or why it must.)

Barzun goes on to point out that "education is not merely schooling." Rather:

It is a lifelong discipline of the individual by himself, encouraged by a reasonable opportunity to lead a good life. Education here is synonymous with civilization .... [which] is a long slow process which cannot be "given" in a short course.

If Barzun is right, the attempt to "give" an education in what has come to be the typical classroom (where ever faster and briefer processes tend to supplant longer and slower ones) is doomed to fail. So it should surprise no one that it has.

The question remains, however, as to whether it has failed irreversibly. It is my hope in these postings to discover the answer.