We need not have begun with these simple elements. We might have started instead with as exhaustive a list as possible of all those institutions and forces that enter into shaping the style and the content of the education of individuals. They would include the family, church, vocation, mass media, the institutions of the arts — like museums, theaters, symphony orchestras, and the recording industry — as well as libraries, the public press, and the institutions of travel. Schools then would come to be viewed as those institutions that attend most directly to mediating some configura¬tion of learning in the lives of people, some way of orchestrating or harmonizing, or bringing together the learning that takes place through the influence of these other institutions of life. This might be an appropriate approach were we concerned to develop the theory of the system in closer relation to the theory of education. We did not begin in this way, however. We began instead by distinguishing between the way any society goes about educating its members, on the one hand —its system of educating — and the educational system, on the other hand.