Current Survey of Reference Sources in Education

It is not news that education has pervasive influence in American society. Our operative skills for everyday life, our professional skills for working life, our personal skills for meaningful life: all of these are derived from educative contexts, in and out of schools. In the broadest frame, we are all teachers and learners, regardless of age or education. Every human is embedded in the complex sets of learning agencies, cultural transactions, and lifelong intergenerational exchanges Lawrence Cremin has called “configurations of education.” These are the permutative influences which mediate and transmit a culture through generations and institutions — work, school, family — and from which every person emerges, more or less intact, as the designer of one life.