This paper advances a conceptualization about the schooling phenomena in order to better understand the schooling process. Schooling is defined as those human interactions occurring in schools in which designated adults are acting to arrange the environment, and mindfully or mindlessly to influence the lives of children in the present and in their becoming adults. To better understand the process, four dilemmas of behavior by a teacher in an English open elementary classroom are analyzed according to G. H. Mead's dialectical social behaviorism theories. This teacher's classroom schooling acts are viewed as manifestations of competing and conflicting ideas in the teacher's mind about the nature of childhood, learning, and social justice. The implication of this theory undermines the basic assumption of performance-based teacher education which emphasizes that it is possible and desirable to determine sets of behavioral criteria to serve as indices of competence. According to this theory, teacher behavior or schooling acts contain not only technical and pedagogical considerations but also conflicting moral and ethical considerations which make purely technical behavioral criteria impossible. (Author/DE)