Reflections on chapter 6: The Three Eras of Education

The way this chapter described the three eras of education (the apprenticeship, universal schooling, and lifelong learning era) helped make the development of our educational systems and the reasons for that change much more clear to me. I liked the way the authors split up the content into sections describing how the responsibility, expectations, content, pedagogy, assessment, location, culture, and relationships in education has changed and how it continues to change within these eras. I find it very interesting that the lifelong learning era in which we are moving into reflects a lot of the practices and values that were seen in the apprenticeship system. Especially in respect to who is responsible for the education of children and young adults. In the apprenticeship era adults were largely responsible for what, how, when, and where students learned. In the Universal schooling era this responsibility was given to the state government and standards based learning and assessments that we see today were made prominent. I see now how, with the onset of the lifelong learning era, responsibility for education is moving back into the ownership of the parents and the individual. Distance education, homeschooling, and other similar practices are facilitating this shift.

Universal schooling was put into practice in order to form a sense of social cohesion. This was needed at the time with the vast immigration of people from all over the world into America. Today this method is not appropriate since the culture, values, and needs of learners have greatly changed. Today, in order to be a successful citizen, one should obtain competencies in identifying, organizing, planning, and allocating resources, interpersonal skills, acquiring and using information, understanding complex systems, and working with a variety of technologies. In order to receive education in these "core competencies" a new system of education is required. Students are now becoming able to make choices based upon their interests and educational needs to gain these competencies.

I agree that educational systems will begin to look very different in the near future with the onset of this lifelong learning era. Though, I wonder what this will look like for early childhood settings. The authors admit that social interaction and peer culture may be compromised with the shift towards a mixed aged culture. As a future early childhood education, I recognize the importance of social interaction and competence for the development of young children. In order to become successful individuals students must form caring and trusting relationships with both adults and peers.