This document discusses the definition and meaning of education. It defines education as the wise, hopeful, and respectful cultivation of learning undertaken with the belief that all should have the chance to share in life. The document explores how education is different from schooling, focusing on creating environments and relationships for learning rather than drilling knowledge into people. It discusses how education is a deliberate, social, and cognitive process aimed at developing understanding, judgment, and enabling action for all.
This document discusses the definition and meaning of education. It defines education as the wise, hopeful, and respectful cultivation of learning undertaken with the belief that all should have the chance to share in life. The document explores how education is different from schooling, focusing on creating environments and relationships for learning rather than drilling knowledge into people. It discusses how education is a deliberate, social, and cognitive process aimed at developing understanding, judgment, and enabling action for all.
This document discusses the definition and meaning of education. It defines education as the wise, hopeful, and respectful cultivation of learning undertaken with the belief that all should have the chance to share in life. The document explores how education is different from schooling, focusing on creating environments and relationships for learning rather than drilling knowledge into people. It discusses how education is a deliberate, social, and cognitive process aimed at developing understanding, judgment, and enabling action for all.
This document discusses the definition and meaning of education. It defines education as the wise, hopeful, and respectful cultivation of learning undertaken with the belief that all should have the chance to share in life. The document explores how education is different from schooling, focusing on creating environments and relationships for learning rather than drilling knowledge into people. It discusses how education is a deliberate, social, and cognitive process aimed at developing understanding, judgment, and enabling action for all.
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What is education?
A definition and discussion What is education? Is it different from schooling? In this piece Mark K Smith explores the meaning of education and suggests it is a process of inviting truth and possibility.
It can be defined as the
wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning undertaken in the belief that all should have the chance to share in life.
contents: introduction • education – cultivating hopeful environments and relationships for learning • education, respect and wisdom • education – acting so all may share in life • conclusion – what is education? • further reading and references • acknowledgements • how to cite this piece
A definition for starters:
Education is the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning undertaken in the belief that all should have the chance to share in life.
Introduction
When talking about education
people often confuse it with schooling. Many think of places like schools or colleges when seeing or hearing the word. They might also look to particular jobs like teacher or tutor. The problem with this is that while looking to help people learn, the way a lot of schools and teachers operate is not necessarily something we can properly call education. They have chosen or fallen or been pushed into ‘schooling’ – trying to drill learning into people according to some plan often drawn up by others. Paulo Freire (1973) famously called this banking – making deposits of knowledge. Such ‘schooling’ too easily descends into treating learners like objects, things to be acted upon rather than people to be related to.
Education, as we understand it here, is a process of inviting truth and possibility, of encouraging and giving time to discovery. It is, as John Dewey (1916) put it, a social process – ‘a process of living and not a preparation for future living’. In this view educators look to act with people rather on them. Their task is to educe (related to the Greek notion of educere), to bring out or develop potential. Such education is:
Deliberate and hopeful. It is
learning we set out to make happen in the belief that people can ‘be more’; Informed, respectful and wise. A process of inviting truth and possibility. Grounded in a desire that at all may flourish and share in life. It is a cooperative and inclusive activity that looks to help people to live their lives as well as they can.
In what follows we will try to
answer the question ‘what is education?’ by exploring these dimensions and the processes involved.
Education – cultivating hopeful environments and relationships for learning
It is often said that we are
learning all the time and that we may not be conscious of it happening. Learning is both a process and an outcome. As a process it is part of living in the world, part of the way our bodies work. As an outcome it is a new understanding or appreciation of something.
In recent years, developments
in neuroscience have shown us how learning takes place both in the body and as a social activity. We are social animals. As a result educators need to focus on creating environments and relationships for learning rather than trying to drill knowledge into people.
Teachers are losing the
education war because our adolescents are distracted by the social world. Naturally, the students don’t see it that way. It wasn’t their choice to get endless instruction on topics that don’t seem relevant to them. They desperately want to learn, but what they want to learn about is their social world—how it works and how they can secure a place in it that will maximize their social rewards and minimize the social pain they feel. Their brains are built to feel these strong social motivations and to use the mentalizing system to help them along. Evolutionarily, the social interest of adolescents is no distraction. Rather, it is the most important thing they can learn well. (Lieberman 2013: 282)
The cultivation of learning is a
cognitive and emotional and so cial activity (Illeris 2002).
Intention
Education is deliberate. We act
with a purpose – to develop understanding and judgement, and enable action. We may do this for ourselves, for example, learning what different road signs mean so that we can get a license to drive; or watching wildlife programmes on television because we are interested in animal behaviour. This process is sometimes called self-education or teaching yourself. Often, though, we seek to encourage learning in others. Examples here include parents and carers showing their children how to use a knife and fork or ride a bike; schoolteachers introducing students to a foreign language; and animators and pedagogues helping a group to work together. Sometimes as educators we have a clear idea of what we’d like to see achieved; at others we do not and should not. In the case of the former we might be working to a curriculum, have a session or lesson plan with clear objectives, and have a high degree of control over the learning environment. This is what we normally mean by ‘formal education’. In the latter, for example when working with a community group, the setting is theirs and, as educators, we are present as guests. This is an example of informal education and here two things are happening.
First, the group may well be
clear on what it wants to achieve e.g. putting on an event, but unclear about what they need to learn to do it. They know learning is involved – it is something necessary to achieve what they want – but it is not the main focus. Such ‘incidental learning’ is not accidental. People know they need to learn something but cannot necessarily specify it in advance (Brookfield 1984).
Second, this learning activity
works largely through conversation – and conversation takes unpredictable turns. It is a dialogical rather than curricula form of education.
In both forms educators set out
to create environments and relationships where people can explore their, and other’s, experiences of situations, ideas and feelings. This exploration lies, as John Dewey argued, at the heart of the ‘business of education’. Educators set out to emancipate and enlarge experience (1933: 340). How closely the subject matter is defined in advance and by whom differs from situation to situation. John Ellis (1990) has developed a useful continuum – arguing that most education involves a mix of the informal and formal, of conversation and curriculum (i.e. between points X and Y).
