What exactly is education?

What exactly is education?


There is an online university that is trying to entice prospective applicants with the tag line "Invest in your success". We can safely assume that education is the investment that prospective applicants are being encouraged to make to guarantee their success.
Many of us have grown up with the injunction from parents or teachers or other well-wishers that "education is the key to success". This "success" that we have been urged to seek after through education means different things to all of us but, basically, it is an improvement of our lives that is evident in us getting "good" jobs, being able to acquire the desirable material things of life, gaining status among other desirable resources.
The view of scholars
Sociologists among other scholars have tried to tell us much about education. From their writings it may be gleaned that education as a concept is multifaceted and that different understanding of education and its role in society abound.
From the input of scholars, we learn that education is an intellectual debate which seeks to provide answers to these and other questions.
Does education prepare us for our roles in society? Does education support other social systems like the economy, the family and government? Does it provide us with skills and knowledge? Does it help us to develop our latent talents, whatever these may be? Is education liberating? Does it encourage critical thinking and initiative? Does it create equality or does it create inequality? Is it exploitative?
These are important questions with which scholars of education in society have been grappling. Some scholars have settled on what education is, some have settled on what education ought to be, some have settled on what it does while others are still searching for its essence.
Lessons gleaned from debate
  • Education seems to be an object, a thing to be possessed, and if we possess it we have acquired a "good". We have acquired something that is advantageous to us and to society.
  • Education seems to be a process, a process through which we acquire knowledge and skills and realise our potential. But it could also be a process through which we are systematically moulded into beings envisioned by those who control society. Either way, education works on us – the end result is that we, as a result of the influence of education on us, are given the tools or we create our own tools to chart our own course through life in society.
  • Education seems to be a strategy. It seems to be a strategy used by those who possess it for various purposes – to get ahead, for control, to attempt to maintain the status quo, to indoctrinate us into accepting ideologies that the proponents believe are more current than existing ones, to empower those less educated than themselves – for contradictory purposes, but for some perceived benefit.
Therefore, when we think about the concept of education, we continue on a voyage of exploration. We think of the perspectives of the theorists, but we also challenge our understanding of the concept by putting our own understanding of it on the table and examining it.
What does education mean to you in your contexts, in the spaces in which you live, work and play?






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