Teacher Tom: What Does the Word "Education" Mean?

Teacher Tom: What Does the Word "Education" Mean?

What Does the Word "Education" Mean?

Yesterday, I made an assertion that I suspected was true, but upon reflection I began to wonder. What I wrote: 

For most of the experience of Homo sapiens, work, family, and play were inseparable, an aspect of the human survival strategy that allowed our species to thrive. For ninety-five percent of our existence we've been evolving brains that function best in the context of communities that include the whole family, many families, young and old, work and play. And one of the results of living in these communities is what we could have called, had we the word for it, education. But we didn't need a word because what we today call education was, as John Dewey wrote, "life itself."

Specifically, what I began to wonder about was the actual origins of the word "education." It appears that there are two distinct roots of the word, both from Latin: educare and educere. Educare means to train or mold someone, and specifically refers to a process of passing along knowledge from one generation to the next, with the goal of shaping youth in the image of their parents through rote learning and future employment in the economy. Educere, in contrast, means to "lead out," in the sense that we are preparing youth for an unknown future, which calls for thinking, questioning, and creating. That these two very different concepts have merged into the single thing that we today call "education" is only really understandable in the sense that they are similar sounding words, because the intended results -- preservation of knowledge v. creation of new ideas -- are really quite different things.

Anyone conversant in Latin can probably quibble with my CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: What Does the Word "Education" Mean?