by Ronald Manalastas

Created on: April 21, 2009

Education represents learning, and learning, borne out of purposeful acquisition, sharing, and utilization of new knowledge, has been the solitary foundation of all human transformation and societal change. Even today, learning is the central force behind all the changes happening around us. This historical and dynamic framework vividly describes the all-time importance of education to people, society, and humanity.

Education denotes the systematic way of learning how to learn. It symbolizes the continuum of knowing and understanding the things affecting life and the interdependence of societies around the world. Education involves the discipline of building values around our inherent capacity to think, act, relate, and learn so that we can harness our strengths and improve on our weaknesses in the process of taking advantage of opportunities and mitigating threats as we face life's challenges. In the words of Horace Mann, "education, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men. It is the balance-wheel of the social machinery."

Education accentuates a disciplined activity. We purposely seek it, share it with people and organizations, and apply it in order that it can produce greater benefits for the greater good. In essence, education is learning coupled with resolute action to understand and maximize the value of new data and information that we get from every learning opportunity. Without this discipline, education ceases to be a productive learning experience: the individual is bereft of new knowledge, forever chained to the bondage of intellectual poverty, and irrelevant to human change and transformation. As Epictetus stated, "we must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free."

The sources of education can be formal or informal. Both formal and informal sources install in us solid experiential and experimental knowledge that widens our thinking perspective, molds our character, intensifies our sense of community, builds our technical skills, strengthens our competitive capacity, and raises our capability to contribute to people and society.

We formally acquire learning from pre-school to university enrollment and in many instances during our adulthood, from institutionalized training, vocational, and continuing education programs. We informally learn from our parents, friends, peers, classmates,

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