by Harrison Forbes

Created on: September 08, 2007

I was born and lived in Europe for twenty some years of my life. A few months after my arrival in the States, I was enrolled in a college, hoping that an American degree was the only way to get two birds with one stone: local training in my new country, and better understanding its people. One of the valuable advices I was offered shortly after I started my new life in Milwaukee, came from an older gentleman, that I considered among my few friends at that time: "be very careful with the use of this term. Europeans attach a more complex meaning to it, while in America it is almost exclusively used to mean 'training'." The term John Carroll was referring to was "education".

I am not going to speak about the linguistic differences right now, for I am not a specialist in the field, and even if I were, Robert MacNeil did it is so well in his PBS mini series, "The Story of English," that I would be a fool even to think of trying to compete with him. I am going to try to take on a word that I found confusing ever since I was faced with it for the first time, here in Milwaukee twenty some odd years ago. This current debate is a living proof that I was not the only one confused by the usage of the word "education".

Reading some of the articles, I noticed that a lot of the contributors, although they did not actually used a dictionary definition of the term, were very close to what I was brought up, in the Old Country, to understand by "education".

Education for me and my family is a process which starts in the family since an early age-these days researches argue that actually it starts in mother's womb-and consists mainly in teaching the future member of the society basic knowledge and norms of conduct which will guide him/her through the rest of the life. A lot of societies put a very strong emphasis on this period of a child' life, from the womb until the child started the formal education. ("The history of education according to Dieter Lenzen, president of the Freie Universitt Berlin 1994 "began either millions of years ago or at the end of 1770". Education as a science cannot be separated from the educational traditions that existed before. Education was the natural response of early civilizations to the struggle of surviving and thriving as a culture. Adults trained the young of their society in the knowledge and skills they would need to master and eventually pass on. The evolution of culture, and human beings as a species depended on this practice of transmitting

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