The school as a social institution

Rarely has a demand regarding school been so persistently repeated through history as the demand that school be related to life. From Seneca to our day this demand has been stressed with variations, never with complete success. Evan our era, characterized by rapid and profound changes in the whole of social life, has not been spared the renewed postulation of this task: school is not only expected to establish a balance between itself and life, it is also expected to hasten social changes. Teachers, politicians and futurologists of all kinds compete in attempting to envisage a type of school which would satisfy this centuries-old aspiration. The essence of the question lies in the fact that school is an institution which originated at the time of the invention of written characters, extracting a certain strata of people who could engage in science and the arts beyond the sphere of productive labour. To this day, school has retained some basic characteristics of this origin. Many of our contemporaries would be surprised if we told them that there was a time when schools did not exist and that perhaps in the far-off future they will cease to exist. Marshall McLuhan has already announced the end of the era of written letters and books, and consequently the disappearance of school in the traditional form to which we are accustomed. Dr. Franković is a former director of the Yugoslav Institute for Educational Research and has served as president of the Yugoslav Union of Pedagogic Societies.