Today's education reflects these themes, but does not fully embrace them. The overall goal of education is to produce well rounded students who could go into a number of profession, not just the civil service. We do rank students by merit into different levels of classes and at graduation my obtained GPAs. (My school is currently go through the placement process for next year and class options are based on current performance.) The rules that dictate how most classes run teacher students to observe rituals and expected behaviors. (We require student to raise their hands and set daily classroom routines.) Individual assessments are an up and (re)coming trend in education. (The idea of project based learning give student opportunities to express their knowledge in a unique way. In more traditional test setting teacher are not being pushed to look at individual students strengths and weakness to prepare for future assessments.)

While not the primary focus of education since the 1980s often times skill such as critical thinking and reasoning are showing up in secondary education. Much of today's schooling is about transmitting information from teacher to student these skills do come into play, especially in upper level classes. (In my honors level history classes we spend a lot of time looking at primary sources and deducing what we can learn about a civilization from its contents). Reasoning is a harder skill to teach in the structure of today's skill, but small bits of this can be seen in Advanced Placement (AP) classes. (I have no personal experience with this, the observation is based of conversations with AP teachers in the building.)

American education is set up mostly as a place for teachers to transmit ideas to students, an ideas put out by Aristotle. (Lesson are set up with teachers providing notes on a certain topic to students.) Aristotle proposed breaking down learning in to various subjects that can be studied individually instead of all together. (Today we have seperate subject for literature, history, math, and science as core pieces to student education.) The idea of using logic to draw conclusions of the observable world are also taught in certain science and social science classes. (Student in chemistry observe a chemical reaction and then draw conclusions based on the results. They often follow the scientific method first introduced by Aristotle.) The levels of education proposed by Aristotle, primary, secondary, and higher education, would also be familiar to anyone in schools today. (In public education we call these levels elemenary, middle/high school, and college.)

Gutek, G. L. (2011). Historical and philosophical foundations of education: A biographical approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.

Observations about modern education are personal in nature and come from my own experience or observations as a teacher in a public school.