Tradition and Culture in European Education

Education and culture do not interact on a purely functional level. We are not just looking at a simple transaction where culture supplies the content, and education passively hands it down to the next generation. The relationship is far more dialectical and, honestly, quite complicated. It can even be contradictory at times. Education does not solely reproduce culture. Rather, it selects, deciphers, and modifies it. At certain historical moments, education radically challenges the very culture that birthed it. This dual capacity, acting as both a bearer of tradition and an agent of change, forms the central axis of this book.The themes explored here are not accidental. They represent aspects of a single endeavor to understand how European education has shaped, and been shaped by, its surrounding culture. Our starting point might seem a bit specific. We begin with the illustrated book in European schools. You might think of images as mere decoration, but readers will soon realize they have rarely served that purpose in the classroom.