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n the education of a nation, as in that of an individual, the greater part occurs outside of schools and colleges. As the distinguished educational statesman

up during the years of schooling alone. It is, as it has always been, the daily creation of people learning and living together. The further back we peer into our educational history, and the further we look into its future, the clearer we see the force of nonschool learning.

As we cast our eyes backward it becomes clear that our greatest teachers were the land itself, in its vast loneliness and its promise of richness; the political and economic challenge of building whole communities, and later a whole society, from the ground up; voluntary groups, which the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville rightly remarked as so characteristically American; popular culture, variously represented by early newssheets, the Lyceums and Chautauquas of the 19th century, and today's commercial and public television; and a potent tradition of self-education stretching from Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln through Thomas Edison and Henry Ford down to Eric Hoffer and Malcolm X in our own day.

Above all, the great spur to learning was the American dream itself. The driving idea was that in this new world a man could fulfill his highest potentialities, become all that he was capable of being. In practice, to be sure, that noble ideal has not been uniformly applied. Throughout our history, considerably less than unlimited individual opportunity has been

afforded to various minorities, and perhaps most pervasively to black Americans. The ideal nevertheless persists. Thus in Frontiers of American Culture, the eminent historian, James Trusloe Adams, observed after a lifetime of studying our past:

I think that what has perhaps struck me most has been the almost unique mobility of life in America, and, due to its infinite opportunities, the variety of jobs and positions - eсопотіс, social, political or other - which any individual may find himself filling in the course of his life... from this has followed the need, above that felt in almost any other country, for constant readjustments, with their educational adjuncts of one sort or another, at almost any age This appears to have been an essential corollary to the whole nature of American life and the American Dream.

Let's focus in on some key moments in American history, to get at least a posthole sense of the pervasiveness and power of nonschool learning. The first settlers to these shores faced, and for the most part mastered, a learning challenge that dwarfs our highly touted "future shock." Imagine uprooting your family to emigrate to China - no, not China, more like the moon: an unknown, primitive, uncivilized, awesome fresh world. At once you face the task of disengaging yourself from your cultural and social setting, of planning for the trip, of trying to foresee what the new world will be like, of planning and preparing for it. Once you get there you have the problems of acclimatization, of providing yourself with the necessities of life, of creating a culture, of writing laws and running a government, of creating a system of justice, of providing needed professional services. What other people have ever faced such a challenge to their ability to master new skills, understand situations quickly and well, make decisions, and create together? Beyond all other countries, this one has confronted its people with the challenge to learn and grow - or die.

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The culture of the Colonies was created and transmitted without reliance schools and colleges. We are taught that Massachusetts established schools in every township in 1647 and that Harvard was founded in 1636. But in fact what Massachusetts did was simply pass a statute which was honored more in the breach than in the observance until well into the 19th century. And what was created at Cambridge in the 17th century was not Harvard as we know it, but an inflated grammar school. Our now-great universities - Yale, Princeton, Wisconsin, California, and the like are barely three generations old, in the sense of being true institutions of higher learning.

Ollic CLICK

In early America it was the community and its institutions which educated the young. "Schooling went on anywhere and everywhere," one historian has noted. "Pupils were taught by anyone and every

the Sunday sermons and mid-week "lectures" of their clergymen, the speeches delivered on holidays and militia days, the books, pamphlets, newspapers, and almanacs which proliferated in the early 18th century. Voluntary organization came to the fore early on. Its spirit is conveyed by the Puritan divine, Cotton Mather, who proposed in 1710 that neighbors form "benefit societies" and address themselves to the following questions, which could well serve as the guiding principles for one of Ralph Nader's public interest groups today:

Is there any matter to be humbly moved unto the legislative power, to be enacted into a law for public benefit?

Is there any particular person whose disorderly behavior may be so scandalous and so notorious that we may do well to send unto the said person our charitable admonitions?

Does there appear any instance of oppression or fraudulence in the dealings of any sort of people that may call for our essays to get it rectified?

Can any further methods be devised that ignorance and wickedness may be chased from our people in general and that household piety in particular may flourish among them?

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When the founding fathers articulated their notions of education, they thought not in terms of schooling but of the entire society. "Jefferson was a great believer in schooling," education historian Lawrence Cremin observes, “but it never occured to him that schooling would be the chief educational influence on the young. Schooling might provide technical skills and basic knowledge, but it was the press and participation in politics that really educated the citizenry. Public education was to be only one part of the education of the public, and a relatively minor part at that."

This point of view echoes throughout the formative years of the Republic. It is a far handsomer ideal than the mere building and maintenance of schools. It proposed a society designed and operated as an environment for learning and growth. Washington, in his Farewell Address, called upon his countrymen to "Promote. .as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge." This commitment to the popularization of knowledge, to the provision to every man the means to know deeply and act wisely, is rightly recognized by Dr. Cremin as the true "genius of American education." We have not been, first and foremost, builders of educational systems. We have been empowerers of learners.

Lacking great research universities and even, for a time, towering intellectual and scientific figures, we nonetheless excelled in the democratization of culture. Some of the earliest observers of prerevolutionary American life, as Merle Curti shows in Growth of American Thought, noted the unique diffusion of knowledge here. America, it might be said, flourished on a lot of little knowledge, rather than on pinnacles of concentrated brainpower. It was an interesting experiment which shaped intellectual

Society, an academy for young boys.

As America entered the 19th century, the burgeoning of splendid initiatives in nonformal education exceeds summarization here. Two stunning inventions must be mentioned: the Lyceum and Chautauqua. The first, launched by Josiah Holbrook in 1826, endeavored to popularize scientific knowledge through the sponsorship of study groups and lecturers, and also to agitate for the establishment of tax-supported public schools. In less than ten years it had 3,500 local organizations, with an overlay of county, State, and national organizations. The chapters created libraries and mini-museums, held weekly meetings, assembled and provided equipment for scientific experimentation, and hosted outside experts. Thoreau wrote in Walden that "The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town."

Following Franklin's fine pattern of stressing both individual self-improvement and social reconstruction, the Lyceums stimulated not only the public school movement but also, some historians argue, the establishment of the U.S. Weather Bureau, library extension, museums and scientific laboratories, the National Education Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In the late 19th century the Chautauqua movement revived many of the impulses behind the Lyceums, though with added features - including summer schools offering plays, concerts, lectures, recreational activities, and formal courses; and for those unable to break away, correspondence study and guided home reading. The motivating forces were religion, money, and self-improvement - perhaps the most quintessentially American educational mixture ever con

cocted. The ideal of its inventor, John Vincent, could hardly be improved on today as an ideal for educators: "that education is the privilege of all, young and old, rich and poor, that mental development is only begun in school and college, and should be continued all of life." With the passage of time its small town base, its religious thrust, and its inevitable excesses and lapses have turned its name into a synonym for American middle-brow cultural strivings. But when it was vital, Chautauqua was an important vehicle in spreading progressive ideas

New York, Lowell in Boston, and Franklin in Philadelphia; voluntary associations of myriad kinds including men's and women's service and professional associations, university extension, worker's education, the popular press, the great national debates over social policy, movements such as abolition, temperance, women's suffrage, the founding of experimental utopian communities.

Even more important than these enterprises were the social and economic conditions of the times. These conditions were still conducive to learning and growth: young people could see, experience, and participate in the work of the world as it occurred around them in small towns and cities. Apprenticeship offered training in most occupations, and there were few restrictions based on the need for formal education and diplomas. Opportunities were plentiful for many people to find and fulfill their aspirations.

Until the last 50 or 60 years this Nation thrived on an on-the-whole healthy faith in practical rather than academic learning. Learning outside of schools and college had been the mainstream. Distrust of schools stretches from Mark Twain, who remarked that "Soap and schooling are not as sudden as a massacre, but are more deadly in the long run," to Margaret Mead, who said: "My grandmother wanted me to get an education, so she kept me out of school." At the start of the 20th century, only ten percent of collegeage youngsters went on to college; the country was run by what we now call (to their damage) "dropouts," and who would argue that it was run with discernibly less humanity and reasonableness, if without computer technology and motivation research?

The significance of the Lyceums and Chautauqua lies in the models they offered of an alternate tradition in American education - alternate to our mainstream conviction that education equals schooling. Horace Mann's crusade for public schools in the mid-1800s is usually presented as an unalloyed blessing. But there was another side to the matter, and from our historical vantage point it assumes considerable importance. “In 1839, after hearing Horace Mann deliver one of his talks," writes philosopher Maxine Green, "Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his Journal: 'We are shut in schools for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.' To know, for Emerson, meant to feel his poetic imagination soar. It meant to open his soul to

'private door.' If, as was likely, the school inculcated vulgar and self-serving habits, or the values associated with Trade, it would merely serve to perpetuate an inadequate society, an Establishment that was basically inhumane."

Of course, Mann won. The public school movement swept all before it. But the suppressed tradition of nonformal, anti-statist, individual education continued flowing underground. It bursts forth periodically, when the oppressiveness and ineffectiveness of the established system becomes intolerable. The most thoughtful spokesman in our time was

tive, and fulfilling callings and things to do, to grow up into. The policy I am proposing tends in this direction rather than away from it. By multiplying options, it should be possible to find an interesting course for each individual youth, as we now do for only some of the emotionally disturbed and the troublemakers. Voluntary adolescent choices are often random and foolish and usually transitory; but they are the likeliest ways of growing up reasonably. What is most essential is for the youth to see that he is taken seriously as a person, rather than fitted into an institutional system.

We do not have to peer into the past to see the potency of noninstitutionalized learning. If we merely open our eyes we will see it all around us today.

Even with schools and colleges so dominating our vision of education, the pervasiveness and importance of nonformal learning is readily demonstrable. Consider the vast educational enterprises of business and industry-occupational training, inservice training, occupational upgrading, manpower development, management and executive training. Add to it education in labor unions-apprentice programs, training of foremen and shop stewards - and an enormous armed forces network involving correspondence study, televised courses, and classroom instruction. Pile on top of this the educational work of churches and synagogues, community centers, civic organizations, voluntary groups, professional organizations with their conferences and conventions, the national health organizations, museums and galleries, libraries, government agencies, service clubs, and public television. Most