Concept of Education 

“Education in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another". 

Aristotle made the point long ago in relation to performances such as 'learning' and 'inferring', that the end is built into the concepts. Ryle has made it more recently in relation to activities such as 'looking' and 'running'. When a man finds something that he has lost or wins a race, he does not indulge in something different from looking or running, neither does he produce something or reach an end which is extrinsic to the activity in which he is engaged. He merely succeeds in it. He achieves the standard or attains the end which is internal to the activity and which gives it point. In a similar way a man who is educated is a man who has succeeded in relation to certain tasks on which he and his teacher have been engaged for a considerable period of time. Just as 'finding' is the achievement relative to 'looking‘, so 'being educated' is the achievement relative to a family of tasks which we call processes of education. 

'Education' is, of course, different in certain respects from the examples of achievements that Ryle gives. To start with 'education' like 'teaching' can be used as both a task and an achievement verb. Teachers can work away at teaching without success, and still be teaching; but there is a sense, also, in which teaching someone something implies success. 'I taught the boy the ablative absolute construction' implies that I was successful in my task. But I can also say 'I taught him Latin for years, but he learnt nothing.' Similarly, I can work away at educating people, without the implication that I or they achieve success in the various tasks which are engaged in; but if I talk of them as 'educated' there is an implication of success. 

But whose success are we talking about? That of the teacher or of the learner? This is tantamount to asking to whose tasks the achievements which constitute 'being educated' are relative, those of the teacher or those of the learner. Obviously, both are usually involved, but it is important to realize that the tasks of the teacher could not characterized unless we had a notion of the tasks of the learner. For whereas 'learning' could be characterized without introducing the notion of 'teaching', 'teaching' could not be characterized without the notion of 'learning'. The tasks of the teacher consist in the employment of various methods to get learning processes going. These processes of learning in their turn cannot be characterized without reference to the achievements in which they culminate. 

For to learn something is to come up to some standard, to succeed in some respect. So, the achievement must be that of the learner in the end. The teacher‘s success, in other words, can only be defined in terms of that of the learner. This presumably is the logical truth dormant in the saying that all education is self-education. This is what makes the notion of 'initiation' an appropriate one to characterize an educational situation; for a learner is 'initiated' by another into something which he has to master, know, or remember. 'Education' picks out processes by means of which people get started on the road to such achievements. 

When talking about education people often confuse it with schooling. Many thinks 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' quickly 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: 

(a) Deliberate and hopeful. It is learning we set out to make happen in the belief that people can 'be more'; 

(b) Informed, respectful and wise. A process of inviting truth and possibility. 

(c) 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.