Thinking, Learning, and the Having of Wonderful Ideas
The word "education" has two Latin roots: educare and educere. Educare means to train or mold someone and specifically refers to a processes 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. The modern word "education" didn't appear in the English language until the tail end of the Middle Ages and was used primarily in the sense of educare, and was largely applied, often brutally, to making peasant youth into compliant workers. By the Enlightenment, however, the word had taken on a meaning more in keeping with educere. And here we are today, arguing over what we want from education.
The lazy answer is to say we want to find a balance, but from where I sit there is no way to balance concepts that cancel one another out. To be well-trained means to be obedient and compliant, which requires the suppression thinking, questioning, and creating. Thinking, questioning, and creating, in turn, leads to individuals inclined to upset the status quo, which stands in direct opposition to the goal of CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: Thinking, Learning, and the Having of Wonderful Ideas
