Is education meant to stimulate critical thinking or should it be reformatted to produce future employees? Or is it meant to do both? These are important questions that parents and educators alike must ask as education and the world undergo profound changes.

In the second part of an ongoing series, David Flower, editor of The Learning Team, looks at a brief history of public education.

In a fascinating editorial in the millennium issue of the Times Educational Supplement, editor Caroline St. John-Brooks reminds readers that when seeking what constitutes a good education, they need to remember, as Sir Winston Churchill claimed, that "in order to look forward intelligently, it is necessary to have looked backward perceptively." With Churchill's aphorism in mind, I would like to draw on St. John-Brooks's editorial to look at the origins of public education.

In mediaeval Britain, parents wanted their sons to follow in their fathers' footsteps, so knowledge was passed through family apprenticeships. The carpenter's son became a carpenter, the miller's son became a miller and the blacksmith's son became a blacksmith—the family tradition was maintained. Schools only began when parents realized that they were not able to teach their children what they needed to learn in order to advance, usually economically. The motive for parents was the "betterment" of their children, which implied the children's ability to access a particular profession, thereby earning more money and thus improving one's station in life, that is to say, one's social class. That was the basis of education for the vast majority in society, although the upper classes did have the financial freedom to dabble in subjects which were totally unrelated to any career—art, music, languages, science and inventions.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution and a significant movement of rural people to the cities, the opportunity for schooling and apprenticeships increased. Britain's schools fostered the continuation of the class system with a distinction made between an academic education for those with unearned incomes, and a vocational education for those who had to earn a living.

In her editorial, St. John-Brooks notes that the British school model was quite different from that which emerged in France or America. In France under Napoleon, schools were expected to educate everyone equally as citizens of the republic. In America, according to Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer, "the public schools before the revolutionary war in the 13 colonies created the possibility of the first mass democracy in human history by educating a population ... in America more than 50 percent of the population was literate in 1776." In Britain there was a reluctance to educate the poor for fear of the power that the new knowledge and skills might give them. After all, an educated poor could be dangerous because they might make decisions that would affect the whole country, and surely that was the sole responsibility of the ruling class. Interestingly, in Britain "the wide sweep of a vision whereby everyone should be educated, for their own good and for the public good, has never been the English way," writes St. John-Brooks.

The current British government's vision of education is that all children have a right to an education, it is no longer "a private good for which families should compete," rather "a public good to which everyone is entitled," she says. Nonetheless, the perceived danger remains, will an educated population threaten those in power in the same way that monarchs and emperors of the past lost their thrones and empires as their subjects became more educated?

Should modern education restrict learning somehow so that those who hold the reins of power can maintain their control? I will address that question in part three of "What is a good education?"