by Lewis J Rhodes

Created on: February 02, 2010   Last Updated: February 03, 2010

Education, or being educated, involves all senses being exposed to a series of stimulae, which will enhance and grow the mental capacity of someone, to achieve a set of, or a specific objective.

Sorry, but this is the author’s definition, and while unproven, is in reality what Socrates was doing so many centuries ago.

Unfortunately our ‘experts’ have little knowledge of this requirement.

Many so called ‘experts’ seem to think that education is a series of processes emanating from a book or procedure, and involves a ‘correct method’, round which a learner should be exposed. This could involve grouping in a classroom, being patronized with a simplistic set or procedures, or having a series of focused interventions enforced on the unsuspecting child after it has been ascertained by inexact psychological tests, where something is considered wrong.

Education is none of these things. It is, in truth, an ongoing process which carries on, both inside a classroom, and even more effectively, in the outside world and environment of the student.

Is it not the ancient statue, the cartoon, the pop music, the peer influence, and if we’re lucky, the ‘van Gogh’ that stimulates the receptive juices of the learner? Is it not the feel, smell and touch of a leather jacket that can so easily sway a learner towards becoming, what none of us so called conformists actually perceive as education? 

Are we, as adults, not limited in our understanding of the word education?

Is not education everything outside what education purports to be?

Should not our classrooms be places of learning, and not, places of instruction? Socrates please roll over!

Already the airwaves of discontent rumble through the haloed walls of academia as PhDs anywhere from Harvard to Oxford sink their hands deeper into dark flowing gowns. Suddenly I am challenged; the academics, the politicians, the honorary degrees come pounding out of their places of learning, out they come, out in defense of the many thousands of hours they have researched, studied and tested. They have theories that are right; they have scientific proof their method works, especially after testing some six hundred samples. It’s a good sample, a sample which will at least help in resolving the issues created by six billion on the planet?

It is the psychologists and the professors who understand what the average actually means; or is it the mean which is an actual average? Then again there is a mode which falls somewhere in between.

No, we all have yet to understand what education really is. In the mean time, we can only expose, facilitate, and assist those students who wish to be assisted, exposed, and facilitated.

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