Common Education and Special Education
Common Education and Special Education
The distinction
- Common education: based on the universal elements of the culture and specialties of general concern.
- Special education: based on the dominant specialties, to train for a particular social or vocational position.
Common education
- Keeps society a closely knit, well-integrated unit.
- Teaches the cultural core: values, sentiments, knowledge, and skills.
- Carries the society’s moral content: its standards of right and wrong, good and evil, true and false.
Once you see that a curriculum grows from its culture, a natural division appears. Some of what a culture holds is meant for everyone; some is meant for particular people in particular roles. Education splits along the same line, into common education and special education.
The distinction
The split maps directly onto Linton’s categories of culture.
Common education, in every culture, is based on the universal elements of the culture, plus the aspects of specialties that are of general concern. It is the education meant for all members of the society, built from the things nearly everyone shares.
Special education is based on the dominant specialties of the culture. It is designed to train individuals for a particular social or vocational position. It is education for some, aimed at the roles they will fill.
| Common education | Special education | |
|---|---|---|
| Built on | Universals and shared specialties | Dominant specialties |
| Meant for | Everyone in the society | Those in particular roles |
| Aim | Hold the society together | Train for a position |
Common education is for everyone; special education is for particular roles
Common education is built on the cultural universals, to hold society together. Special education is built on the dominant specialties, to train individuals for a social or vocational position.
What common education does
Common education has a clear job: it is concerned with maintaining the society as a closely knit and well-integrated unit. It is the glue that keeps a society holding together as one.
Its principal content is the rules and knowledge by which people as a whole regulate their own behaviour and anticipate the behaviour of one another. To live together, people need a shared sense of how others will act, and common education supplies it. It emphasises the fundamental universals, the cultural core: the values, sentiments, knowledge, and skills that give a society its stability and vitality, and that give individuals their motivations and deep-lying controls of conduct.
At the heart of these universals is the society’s moral content. This is the set of standards and knowledge by which people decide what is right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, true and false, and appropriate or inappropriate across all kinds of activity, political, economic, aesthetic, and educational. Alongside this moral content sits practical knowledge and skills for the control and improvement of common activities, such as people’s political and economic behaviour. Together, the moral content and the shared practical knowledge make up the subject matter of common education.
The cultural core: shared values, sentiments, knowledge, and the society’s moral content
It teaches the rules by which people regulate their behaviour and anticipate each other’s, including the standards for right and wrong, true and false, that hold a society together.
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