Think it Over: Rethinking the term education

What does the word education mean to you? It has such negative a connotation to some people, especially those who have had 13 years in an “educational” setting where they had zero choices regarding such a personal concept. We have a tendency to point toward a school or teacher or anything with authority as a source for an education when in reality, everything we experience has the capacity to offer learning. Indeed—when are we not learning?

Natural Born Learners has a beautiful post up about reclaiming the word education. Doesn’t it feel weird to have to reclaim it in the first place? Beatrice distinguishes between learning and education in her blog, but she also examines how the unschooling world has started to become more “schoolery,” with its own rules and judgments. She was recently criticized, for example, for using the term “education” in an unschooling community online. This community doesn’t speak for all unschoolers, but you see how these “regulations” can manifest.

Of course, a movement doesn’t do this on its own—the people inside the movement assign these values to it over time. In fact, I can’t think of any movement that has survived without its members refining and defining it on their own terms, for good or for bad. Just look at the evolution of religion.

 I would argue that we still have use for the word education to encapsulate the results of all of the learning we experience throughout our lives, but that we can’t detach it from the school-based definition it has right now until people do acknowledge that there is value (often much more value) in non-school learning. As many people are turning toward homeschooling and discovering (re-discovering, really) that there are so many more ways to learn, I think that’s truly possible.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia