My Working Definitions for Education, Schooling, and Learning

Trying to create definitions which everybody can agree on is probably a hopeless task. A quick perusal of the current wikipedia definitions of the terms "education", "learning", and "schooling" illustrates the confusion, difficulty, and lack of consensus about defining these terms.

My hope is to create practical frames which make useful distinctions to inform thought and discussion about education reform. I've encountered lots of valuable ideas, thought, and discussion by people who care deeply about education and learning [and schooling], but my sense is that its collective usefulness is diminished by a lack of clarity.

Education is society's means of transmitting, preserving, and renewing its core knowledge to its members. Education has an individual dimension, but the social/societal dimension is more prominent, since this institution is essentially society's creation to benefit its individual members, not the other way around.

As a fundamentally societal enterprise, education is deeply cultural, highly political, & inescapably moral.
Schooling is also intensely social in its current form.

Learning is an individual's means of making sense of one's life, experience, society, and the universe. The individual dimension is more prominent, although all learning has a social dimension.