Education, History of

The history of education is the study of the origin and evolution of organized learning in the lives of individuals, groups, institutions, and nations. The field attempts to assess the values and behaviors of systems of education, their achievements and dysfunctions. In this sense, the field is akin to other social scientific approaches to education, such as sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science. It is not too much of an overstatement to say that the field is concerned with the vast cultural terrain between theories about how education should work and what children and adults actually do with what they have learned. Rather than recounting the history of education, this entry looks at the field of study and its principal scholars.