Education

Definition of Education

by Don Berg, Founder
Attitutor Services

The definition of education in common usage, that education is merely the delivery of knowledge, skills and information from teachers to students, is inadequate to capture what is really important about being and becoming educated.

The proper definition of education is the process of becoming an educated person.

Being an educated person means you have access to optimal states of mind regardless of the situation you are in.

You are able to perceive accurately, think clearly and act effectively to achieve self-selected goals and aspirations.

A Proper Definition of Education

The common definition of education is simply wrong when you consider how education actually occurs.
A proper definition of education will have to cover these four important aspects of how we become educated:

1. The necessity of having and manipulating knowledge, skills and information
2. The helpfulness of teachers, without requiring them
3. The constant need to see through the inherent illusions that arise from our unconscious thought processes, and
4. Our ability to influence our states of mind

Based on these four criteria I define education as a process of cognitive cartography.

Two Problems With the Traditional Definition of Education as Delivery

There are two problems with this definition of education.

First, the definition of education using the delivery metaphor is too often taken to be literally true.


Knowledge, skills, and information, as we mean these terms in the field of education, are not literal units.
In computer science and telecommunications they deal with literal units of information in the form of electrical pulses that can be observed in a variety of ways.
In education we are dealing with entire realms and fields of both worldly phenomena and uniquely human narratives that have no literal, physical existence.


We use the term “unit” as a convenient way to organize our thoughts about a complex set of phenomena that is utterly incomprehensible without this metaphor.


What we know from the findings of cognitive and neuro-sciences is that even science and mathematics use metaphors to develop ideas about complex and otherwise incomprehensible phenomena.


If even our deepest scientific and mathematical understandings of the physical, literal world are based on metaphors, then it is neither surprising nor unusual to use metaphors in our defintion of education. (see Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff & Johnson, Basic Books 1999, and Lakoff & Nunez, Where Mathematics Comes From, Basic Books 2000)but it is a problem to take a metaphor literally.


What we learn from this insight into how we understand the world is that our understandings of anything complex, especially something as vastly complex as education, are based on metaphors and the challenge is to figure out which of the metaphors are most useful for creating the right outcomes.
The second problem with this definition of education is that it is pathetically inadequate for describing what is most important about both the process of becoming, and the results of being, an educated person.


Whenever I have pushed people to really delve into what they mean when they talk about a person being educated they quickly abandon the notion that educated people have a greater quantity of information or that they have the traditional evidence of instructional bookkeeping like diplomas, degrees, certificates, etc.

A Three Role Circus

There are three roles that must be fulfilled in becoming educated, but only one of them requires a person, the other two can sometimes be fulfilled by inanimate objects.

The roles are a learning agent, a learning catalyst, and the learning context.

The learning agent is the active map-maker.

The learning agent is obviously the student as that role is normally thought of in schools.

The learning catalyst is someone or something that the agent engages in a deep relationship with and attempts to understand how the catalyst fits into the agent’s world.

In goal directed activity the agent will engage with people or things that s/he assumes will be instrumental in the process of attaining the goal until the agent concludes otherwise and then may attempt to disengage.

A catalyst can be a person fulfilling the school role of teacher, but it can also be a book, a tree or a rock.

What causes learning in the learner is the development of a particularly deep relationship in which the learner opens him/herself to internal transformation under the influence of the catalyst.

The learning context is everything else around the learner and catalyst that influences their relationship.

The learning context is all the biological, psychological, cultural, social, and ecological factors that shape how the agent relates to the catalyst.

There are a myriad of variations that will occur based on differences of physical health, the presence of coercion, what particular slang or jargon is used, what language(s) are being used, and what the climactic conditions are in the learning situation.

In the school setting the context is the classroom, the school, the community, the society, and if we want a person to fulfill the role then the best icon is the school principal, who is supposed to be responsible for facilitating the educational aspects of the relationship between students and teachers.

The Classroom

Consider the classroom using the cognitive cartography metaphor.

The student is generally assumed to be the learning agent, but as Paulo Friere emphasized, the teacher who is not also learning is not really teaching.

The teacher is generally assumed to be the learning catalyst, but once again, there are many more opportunities for other students to be learning catalysts than the teacher given the usual ratio.

Finally the classroom itself is assumed to be the learning context, but there is an entire world beyond the classroom that impinges upon what happens there.