Meaningful discussion of the nature and methods of education have been bedevilled by difficulty in agreeing on the root of the term. It comes from Latin, certainly, but does it come from "educare" or "educere"? The first means to fill up, as in filling up a glass with water, while the second has to do with leading or drawing out.

In the second chapter of his novel "Hard times", Charles Dickens introduces a character called Mr Gradgrind who runs a school. Gradgrind sees his pupils as "little pitchers" who need to be filled with facts. He calls on a boy called Bitzer to define a horse. This the boy does by means of a memorised definition of a series of facts about horses. He includes in his definition the word "graminivorous". a word the meaning of which it is highly unlikely that he was aware. He had learned facts and been filled up - "educare" - but, if he could not have understood the language in which his definition was couched, can we say that he had been educated?

More recently, those of us in education have realised that a major part of our task is to discover the talents of our students and the things in which they are interested. These can then be brought forth and developed and provide a sense of fulfillment for the student. Clearly, this reflects the idea of education as being derived from "educere".

Jacques Maritain, an eminent teacher of philosophy, wrote "You will not learn from me philosophy, but how to philosophise: not thoughts to repeat, but how to think." I have always used this as the basis for my work as a teacher. My function is not to provide my students with pre-digested facts that can be examined by means of a multiple-choice test. It is to provide them with the materials upon which to base their own thinking and further discovery according to their interests and talents - and the testing process has to provide them with opportunities to display that thinking.

I have just spent ten years teaching adults in China, My classes were very small, so it was possible to deal with individual differences quite easily but, especially in their primary schools, class sizes are very large. This results in a teaching method that is closer to the Victorian ideal of filling up the pupils with facts. If the teacher asks a question, the whole class choruses the answer. How does the teacher know if a particular pupil has given the correct answer or, indeed, had given any answer at all?

However, this fits with the traditional thinking of many Asian cultures. The emphasis is on the group and not the individual.. As a Japanese proverbs says "If a nail protrudes from the surface of the wood it will soon be knocked down again."

So, what can we say about education? Firstly, we can assert that it should be an enabling activity for the student. Secondly, however, we can say that it may not be so enabling in cultures where the individual is considered to be subservient to the masses.

In the West, most educators see the word as deriving from "educere", but in less developed cultures or those in which there is less emphasis on individual development, the practice of education still adheres to the idea of "educare".

Wannabe, Thanks for your comment. I don't see educare as damaging, for that would imply that something had been done to them that turned a good person into a bad one. If a car is hit by another, it is "damaged". Rather,I see somebody who has been entirely brought up under an eduacre system as having never achieved the best of which he or she is capable in terms of self-fulfilment. They haven't been damaged as much as some part of their potential has been wasted.


While I agree that many Asian countries outsource their HIGHER education to centres in the West, they do not similarly outsource the lower levels - unless the parents have the money to send their children to boarding schools in the West. Many millions of children from ordinary working class families have no alternative at any level than to manage with the indigenous system. Thus many are frustrated and grow up with little hope of being able to get out of the system in which they have become mired.

As for the USA, I agree that their standards of education have dropped seriously in recent decades. They still have some world-class universities, but the average high school seems to be having trouble. Not only is there a lack of perfomance and motivation on the part of the students in many of these schools, but, it seems, there is increasing corruption manifested in the manipulation of SAT examination. There was a headline about this quite recently.

However, why would you advocate a system that begins with one interpretation of education and then switches to another? In many schools, the two run side by side. The facts are given and then there are exercises to enable the student to use those facts to solve problems. This is not new and it works very well. Is this what you had in mind when you recommended an "alternating" system?

-- Updated April 3rd, 2012, 7:57 am to add the following --

Belinda, I agree almost totally with what you have said here. I, too, omitted something from y original post - something very important. This is the aspect of responsibility in education. This is really a subject for a thread on its own, but one of the unfortunate side-effects of an emphasis on educere can be the emergence of individuals who believe that they are free to express themselves in any way they like - under the cover of "personal freedom".

While I would not suggest that personal freedoms should be taken away - except as the result of some criminal activity - I strongly advocate the use of such freedoms with responsibility. Some pop music groups and talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh have regularly overstepped the mark in this respect and have made public pronouncements that are irresponsible and potentially detrimental to social stability. The cults of personality that surround such people are, to my mind, a negative effect of an otherwise beneficial emphasis on each person being himself - thinking and acting on the basis of his own reason, but always with responsibility for others in his society.

Wannabe, Thank you for the reply. However, with respect, I think you have got educare and educere mixed up when it comes to education in the USA.

If they are teaching to a test - as they usually are because the students need good test scores to progress to College and the teachers get recognition for producing good test scores - then they are filling the students' heads with the facts that they need to pass the test. This is pure educare.

What is not happening so much is any attempt to discover the individual potential of the students. Are they good at music, or languages? One of the few areas where this seems to be done is in sport. A potential footballer will quickly be identified and then groomed for the school team, as the success of that team gives prestige to the whole school. But how many schools pride themselves on having a good orchestra or chorus? ("Mr Holland's opus" comes to mind!) This bringing out of the individual's potential is educere and it seems to be missing in many schools.

Belinda,

If you interchange your use of educare and educere throughout your post, I would agree with you entirely! Educare is what Bitzer suffered under - being filled with facts the choice of which he had no control over. This surely is the aristocratic approach as it is the privileged class who decides what should be taught.

Educere puts much more responsibility for their education on the students as they are able to choose many of the subjects from a menu that is presented to them and, in the best schools, they will receive careful advice on how to match their choices to their abilities, interests, aptitudes and life aspirations. As they progress through the study of these selected subjects, they get a feeling of fulfillment and empowerment that is denied to those who have to put up with the educare style of school.

Hilda, many thanks for this. Virgil's idea poses an interesting problem about the ownership of knowledge. If a person learns "someone else's muse" can he claim the learning as his own?

As for schooling, you have a point when you say that a school in many ways simply provides an environment within which learning can take place and the actual content is irrelevant. We see this every day when we see the many different subjects being taught in our schools and other educational institutions.

Good post, Wannabe, and you have hit several nails directly on their heads.

Why is there more money in pro-sports than in pro-orchestras? Why are the gifted not recognised if they are outside a very narrow range of specialisms?

The answer to this goes to the root of the country's value system. What do the majority of people find valuable? Sports, pop music, movie stars, anything to take their minds away from the "real" problems of their lives.

Look at the articles that appear in Yahoo. Movie stars are criticised for what they wear, or they are praised for having their photos taken during or shortly after pregnancy. Of what business is this to the average member of the general public? Would they allow themselves to be pictured in this way? Would they accept being criticised for what they wear when what they wear is a matter of personal taste and, therefore, not the province of anybody else? What right have these so-called pundits to "rule" on such matters?

How many "stars" really have what it takes to be called stars? How many of them are manufactured by their publicists - paper creations made of hype?

The values of the USA and of many other so-called advanced countries have been perverted by the media and the advertisers of Madison Avenue. This has happened at a time when, by their own admission, their schools have been "dumbed down"! It is not surprising that more emphasis is put on a pro-footballed than a leading orchestra under these circumstances. But, is it right?

You ask for solutions. If I could provide a solution for the problems we have outlined in this short thread, I would not be retired but would be fighting off demands that I come to advise national governments all over the world! hehe.

However, look at the way a country's budget is balanced. If ten per cent of the money spent - squandered - by the Department of Defence had been wisely used by the Department of Education, much of the problems would have been at least reduced if not eliminated. If those in the classrooms of the public school system saw their occupation as a vocation rather than as a job solely to earn money, that would also improve the situation. But that would require the society as a whole to recognise the value of their teachers. Here the Asian situation is instructive. In China, men in their middle years ,who have succeeded or not in their lives, still show an attitude to their teachers that borders on reverence. They will visit their teachers in their retirement and bring them gifts to show their respect for what they did for them when they were in school. Where do you see this in the West? Teachers call themselves professionals, but many do not behave as if they are and most are not viewed as such by others in their society.

These are the things that need to be changed. Values and the attitudes that they produce. But, can you see it happening any time soon?

Wow!! The discussion is getting some real momentum now!

Before I comment on individual posts, let me say that I made a mind map of the topic based on the posts and was surprised to see just how many areas we have touched on in just over dozen posts. We started with linguistics but have now come to the nature of society, values, government and the importance or otherwise of science in the modern world. That's quite a journey to have been taken so quickly.

Wannabe,

Boycotting television might be a little extreme, I think. However, I'm all in favour of much more selectivity in what one watches. After all, there are channels like Discovery and Nat Geo that could help to make the population more aware of scientific and technical developments. One would have be very careful with the news channels, however, as so many of them are completely unbalanced and biased in their presentations - catering, of course, for the lowest common denominator of a dumbed down society.

Using education to raise the lowest common denominator to a higher level is something that I would certainly support. But then I would probably be accused of being elitist and not egalitarian. This raises the spectre of who should receive education. Should everybody be able to go to university - even though 75% of them may not be able to benefit from a higher level of education? what is the difference betwen "freedom of access" and "freedom of opportunity"? This is one for you to look at!!

Belinda,

Your observation in Post #13 that different subjects in the curriculum have different values in terms of their effects on the leaners is absolutely correct. A totally science-based curriculum would produce people who were calculating in almost all their activities, while the insertion of what are ususally referred to as the "Humanities" softens that effect and, if taught well, makes the individual more aware of what it is to be human and what rights a human being might reasonably be expected to enjoy.

To both of you,

I would suggest that the keyword here is BALANCE between the subjects. What do you think? If you agree that balance is key, where would you put the balance in a high school curriculum?

Wannabe,

Thanks for the complimentary suggestion that I should set up a charter school. Perhaps if I were in the USA I could. But I am living in the Philippines, so could not do much except to offer advice from here!!

This seems to be an intensely behaviourist interpretation of a school,based on a sorft of "You are what you do" conceptualisation. I have always found behaviourism difficult to accept - especially the SR theory - as it seems to deny the opportunity for free will that is something that I find crucial to being a human.

I would suggest that, based on your interpretation of the purpose of a school, more of them are failing than we might have thought previously. When looked at from the point of view of learning information many schools would get dismal grades. However, when looked at as places where attitudes and god behaviour are the prime objectives, they would perform at an even lower level. The attitudes and behaviour of so many young people these days are far from what a civilised society has a right to expect. (Or is this just another example of a generation gap, something that even PLato bemoaned?)

Hello everybody. My apologies for the break in communication. I have been away during the Easter weekend and have been staying in a tiny village in the mountains where there is no electricity and therefore no Internet! It was wonderful to spend time in almost unspoiled countryside, showering under a waterfall and swimming in a hot spring!!

Unfortunatly, all things come to an end and I am back to find a huge accumulation of emails among which were those from you! Where to begin?

We seem to be focusing at the moment on language ability and whether or not certain life experiences can contribute to education. A distinction has been made between "academic" learning and what we might call "social" learning. But what is this distinction?

Putting things briefly, and therefore risking over-simplification, academic learning is characterised by being intentional, formal and usually conducted in specially designated places - schools and colleges. Social learning is often not deliberately sought but happens as a result of our everyday social interactions. There can be some degree of overlap as, for instance, when we learn a fact from a discussion over a beer with friends. The fact may well be one that we would normally have learned in school, but, on this occasion, we learned it elsewhere.

Academic learning tends to a significant extent to be factual, whereas social learning tends to have to do with behaviour in society and attitudes that are what society expects us to think. Again, there is overlap as we can learn attitudes from our teachers in school as well as from those whom we encounter outside the school room.

The attitudes we learn in school should be those of inquiry, reasonable and tolerant discussion and rational thought - with its accompanying critical elements. Some of these can be learned informally by observing a good teacher and learning the way he thinks and explains matters to us. Others are learned in more formal settings such as class discussions and debates.

We learn that having an opinion about something is one thing, but claiming knowledge of that things is quite another. An opinion on something is relatively informal, is often based on scanty information and can frequently be completely mistaken. Knowledge, on the other hand, requires that what a person claims to know is true, is believed by the "knower" to be true, and is supported by necessary and sufficient evidence. It cannot be claimed without the exercise of reason and our critical faculties. In contemporary society, it is unlikely that we shall learn these necessary tools of thought outside a formal educational situation.

Where, then do the media fit into this picture? Belinda indicates, quite rightly, the transitoriness of television programmes and the difficulty they have in making their audiences think. The images and words flash in front of the viewer and are gone. Wannabe suggests that television and the theatre emphasise emotions rather than factual content.

I would both agree and disagree with these views. Certainly television and radio are transitory - unless we are going to record everything that we watch or listen to! - but, if the ideas presented are powerful enough, they will be remembered and can form the basis for important and meaningful discussions afterwards. I have used a short televisual clip to incite a discussion among my students on several occasions - especially among medical students.

As far as emotions are concerned, we all have them. This makes it an important part of the function of education to show us how to handle emotions - both how to express them in words and how to control them in the interests of personal psychological well-being and of social stability. The performing arts have a very important educational role here, but they can only be successful if there is a knowledgeable and skilled teacher directing the activity. Emotions can quickly get out of hand if not directed well.

Solo or group learning? I agree that sitting quietly reading a book can be a useful source of learning. However, depending on the subject matter, solo reading can often be far from sufficient for true learning to take place. We may think that we have under stood what we have read, but have we really? How are we sure that we have got the point the author is trying to put across to us? (Remember, here, that our understanding of what we read is strongly dependent on our personal background.) If the author is not a particularly skilled one, how are we sure that we have not been seduced by some kind of ambiguity in his writing?

Even if we can answer the above questions confidently, we cannot be certain that there are not alternative interpretations of what we have read. Even in science, where matters are often expressed in mathematical terms and seem to be conclusive, there are still many opportunities for disagreement and dispute. If we read alone, will we notice these opportunities? If we miss them, have we really learned all that we could have learned from what we have read? If we were able to discuss with others who had read the same material, but who had also probably read several other items that we had not read, would we not all attain a deeper understanding of the matters at hand?

I have thrown out a number of questions here, any one of which would be material for a thread of its own. My object is to get deeper thinking from all of us - I'm being Socratic as this is a very good method of teaching where the subject matter is not formalised like mathematics. I hope it will stimulate the next round of our discussion which will then throw out more issues for us to tackle.

Best wishes to you all.

Dave.

Prometheous, a rather belated welcome to the forum and, particularly, to this thread. I hope that the torch that you appropriated from the gods will shed some light on our discussions before you have to go to your eternal punishment

Perhaps I may attempt to answer your point and, in doing so, help the others with the problem we are examining. What if educare and educere could be represented by two circles in a Venn diagram? The circles partially overlap and, where they do, BOTH educare and educere apply. However, there will still be areas outside the area of overlap where only one of them will apply. In most classrooms, both apply as the teacher gives information - educare - and encourages the students to expand on it by doing extension exercises - educere. At other times, the teacher may seek out a student's skill - educere - without giving information.

If we cannot produce some albeit imperfect definition of education we are in trouble, for it makes statements that we use all the time meaningless. Consider the following

He is boorish, he is not educated.

The education system of country X is in trouble.

You cannot get a good job unless you have had a good education.

These sentences are frequently heard and must have some kind of meaning unless we are going to accuse ourselves of speaking meaningless nonsense. The problem is that, if we cannot reach some kind of basic agreement about what the term means, we cannot use it. Wittgenstein pointed out that the limits of his language defined the limits of his world as he could not speak of anything that lay outside the range of his vocabulary and syntax.

I wish I could share Wannabe's optimism about somebody eventually seeing something if the blind lead the blind. I fear that the chances are so slim as to be negligible.

Belinda,

Yes, social skills can be learned at the same time as academic knowledge. A classroom is a social setting an, to be able to function well in such a setting one has to develop and deploy social skills. However, I don't think that social and academic skills are the same, though they should often be complementary. You may need certain academic skills to be a good conversationalist, but you need the right social skills as well - skills like being a good listener, being tolerant of other people who have a different point of view from your own, being patient with those who are less adept at the activity than you are. . .

Wannabe,

What do you understand by "prosperity"?

Some poeple would define it in materialist terms, but would you agree that this makes the human being a one-dimensional creation?

What about the non-material - "spiritual" - aspect? (Note, by "spiritual" I am not implying just religion - or even religion. There are many spiritual dimensions to our existence.)

I agree that the spirit cannot be taugght, Indeed, I am not sure what would constitute education of the spirit.

However, experience has convinced me that many people are not in touch with their spiritual dimension. Surely, it is this getting in touch with the spiritual side of ourselves that is the justification for education in the arts? Social activities also make us (more) aware of the spirits and spiritual needs of others.

I agree with you about arts education. It is one of the reasons why I am so saddened by the decline in arts education in Britain and the falling standards in the arts in that country. I fear that it may be true of other countries also.

Science is important as an area of inquiry in its own right and as the basis for the economically important technologies that are based on it. But I fear that the balance in education (and, perhaps, in life in general?) has shifted too far to the sciences and the technologies - to the detriment of the arts. This can tend towards a dehumanising of the students.

Kameshwar and Sekhar,

Welcome to this thread and thank you both for injecting a fresh insight into our discussion. I agree that we had got rather fixated on the USA, perhaps because Belinda and Wannabe come from there (though I have no hard evidence for this assertion!). The Indian perspective will make us all think slightly differently about our topic.

Everybody,

I had been thinking about where to take this thread next and had decided that we were ready to tackle a seductively simple question "What does it mean to be educated?" This involves many of the areas that we have already mentioned, but a complete answer will force us to look farther afield to give a clear meaning to the term.

Some may question the need for such an exploration, possibly citing St Augustine's famous reply when he was asked about the concept of Time. He said that when nobody asked him what Time was, he knew very well, but, when they asked him, he realised that he knew nothing. However, he and those around him still used the concept. They did not erase the word from their lexicon. We are in the same position with "education". It is a word in English and we cannot simply pretend that it does not exist. Therefore, we have to explore possible meanings and try to come to some conclusion as to how the word should be used.

I look forward to reading your views on what it means to be educated.

Good luck!

Wannabe,

I agree with what you have written, but I suggest that it is totally inadequate in the context of our present discussion. The reason? It is totally subjective. The only person who could decide who is or is not educated on your model would be the individual himself. Had he acquired the knowledge necessary for him to be able to do wha he wanted to do?

This would make statements like "the people in vountry X are poorly educated" meaningless as the statement refers to a group of people each of whom has his own standards for determining educatedness. Such a situation would very probably lead to a quick disappearance of the word "educated" from our lexicon. But, for as long as it remains viable, we need to have a different definition - one that can refer both to individuals and to groups.

Another problem that I see with your suggestion is that it refers ONLY to knowing and knowledge. Doesn't being educated consist of more than simply knowing things? Consider this scenario. A brilliant university teacher - one who is highly respected by his students and his colleagues for his knowledge and teaching skills - is discovered to be involved in domestic violence against his wife and children. Is he "educated"? If not, why not?

We live in social groups, so any definition of Education should be capable of being applied to groups as well as to individuals.

Wannabe,

Why do we have and use dictionaries?

How many definitions of "educated" can you find in the dictionary?

Do these definitions not set boundaries for what we can understand by "educated"? Not only what we can understand but also the limits of any discussion on the topic?

If every individual had his or her own definition of a term, communication would be extremely hard - assuming that it was possible at all.

That is what I am trying to get at. I am trying to find a serviceable meaning for "educated" that we can all understand and use successfully in our communications with each other.

Belinda,

I don't wnt to give a definition of "educated" yet, but I can say that I believe that a definition can be found that can be used for any culture. What will change is the content of the education. The objective will be the same across cultures.

To make this easier to see, consider Wannabe's African tribe. If asked, they will be able to tell you what they understand by being "educated" - IN THEIR CULTURE. It will be very different from what you or I understand, but it still enables them to say that a person is or is not educated. What will differ is the content - what one needs to know and to be able to do - in order to earn the accolade.