Education is everywhere, from babies’ first exploratory grabs and bumps to adults’ groping encounters with new technologies. Schools actually account for relatively little of what we must learn to get along in everyday life. This concentration encourages close examination of settings and practices that fly beneath the educative radar, like sports or gardening or cooking, as well as those that more closely resemble schooling but take place elsewhere, like gyms, community centers, businesses, libraries, and museums.
Schooling itself also extends beyond school walls. For example, middle class American families take school-like behavior with them into all kinds of non-school places like the supermarket when a parent holds up an item and asks a child, “what is this?” or points at a clock and asks, “what time is it?” If judging the answer right or wrong is part of the sequence, then school-talk makes schooling present, beyond school. Further, doing school outside school prepares participants for school, while the education it takes for competency in many jobs like farming, waiting tables, and making things by hand can be arduous yet count for little in the world of credentials. Thus looking at education beyond schools not only helps us understand what happens around us but also how various trajectories on the way to expertise track with or fall outside relations of power.
Suggested programs of study include, with 32 total points: