meaning of the education

Daily Crossword
Word Puzzle
Word Finder
Word of the Day
Synonym of the Day
Word of the Year
Language stories
All featured
Gender and sexuality
All pop culture
Writing hub
Grammar essentials
Commonly confused
All writing tips
Pop culture
Writing tips

[ ej- oo - key -sh uh n ]

Synonyms: learning , schooling , instruction

the act or process of imparting or acquiring particular knowledge or skills, as for a profession.

a university education.

to show one's education.

Synonyms: enlightenment , knowledge , learning

the science or art of teaching; pedagogics.

/ ˌɛdjʊˈkeɪʃən /

the act or process of acquiring knowledge, esp systematically during childhood and adolescence

his education has been invaluable to him

education is my profession

a course in education

a university education

consumer education

Other Words From

anti·edu·cation adjective
noned·u·cation noun
over·edu·cation noun
preed·u·cation noun
proed·u·cation adjective
super·edu·cation noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of education 1

Synonym Study

Example sentences.

Simply listening to a lecture is not effective in the real world, and yet that largely remains the default mode of education online.

While Brunskill doesn’t believe there’s any silver bullet solution to fixing education or recruitment systems, he remains optimistic in Forage’s future.

A new study shows that academic medical researchers, who represent some of the most accomplished scientists with decades of education under their belts, are no exception to that trend.

Enormous investment in education going right the way back into the early 19th century.

In this bleak time for public education, I’ve been straining to decipher some silver linings.

Education controls the transmission of values and molds the spirit before dominating the soul.

What they believe impacts economic policy, foreign policy, education policy, environmental policy, you name it.

Congress is attempting to pass the buck on federal funding for education.

The Supreme Court eventually stepped in and ended legal segregation in the landmark 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education.

This is why arguments for little to no federal oversight of education are so disturbing.

It seems to be a true instinct which comes before education and makes education possible.

I am pleading for a clear white light of education that shall go like the sun round the whole world.

He became a doctor in two hours, and it only cost him twenty dollars to complete his education.

And now let me come to the second problem we opened up in connection with college education—the problem of its extension.

If we are to have a real education along lines of expression we must begin with the "content," or cause, of expression.

Related Words

improvement
information
scholarship

More About Education

What is a basic definition of education .

Education is both the act of teaching knowledge to others and the act of receiving knowledge from someone else. Education also refers to the knowledge received through schooling or instruction and to the institution of teaching as a whole. Education has a few other senses as a noun.

Education is a word that covers both the act of instructing and the act of learning. It usually refers specifically to the teaching of children or younger people and the learning done by them.

Real-life examples: Elementary schools, high schools, and colleges are institutions focused on education: People are taught important information and life skills at these places. Medical schools, law schools, and driving schools provide more specialized forms of education.

Used in a sentence: The proper education of children is considered important in every country.

Related to this sense, education refers to the specific level or type of instruction a person has received.

Used in a sentence: He has a high school education.

Education also means the specific knowledge or scholarship a person has acquired from being taught.

Real-life examples: Doctors have an education in medicine. Chemists have an education in chemistry. Bankers have an education in finance or economics.

Used in a sentence: She has an education in languages and is fluent in French and Italian.

Education is also used to refer to the process or institution of teaching in general.

Real-life examples: Most teachers have college degrees in education. Nations often devote a portion of their budget to education.

Used in a sentence: My brother decided to pursue a career in education.

Where does education come from?

The first records of education come from around 1525. It comes from the Latin ēducātiōn-. Education combines the verb educate , meaning “to teach or to train,” and the suffix -ion , which turns a verb into a noun.

Did you know ... ?

What are some other forms related to education ?

antieducation (adjective)
noneducation (noun)
overeducation (noun)
preeducation (noun)
proeducation (adjective)
supereducation (noun)

What are some synonyms for education ?

instruction

What are some words that share a root or word element with education ?

educational

What are some words that often get used in discussing education ?

elementary school
high school

How is education used in real life?

Education is a common word used to refer to teaching and learning. Almost everyone agrees that a person should receive some form of education.

For 80% of foreign business executives, the education and training of France's workforce make France attractive for foreign investment. — Gérard Araud (@GerardAraud) May 11, 2017

Too many of our young people cannot afford a college education and those who are leaving college are faced with crushing debt. — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 24, 2015

We need to continuously invest in education. That means early childhood education, AP classes, and investing in New York City’s teachers. — Bill de Blasio (@BilldeBlasio) November 15, 2017

Try using education !

True or False?

If a person has a college education, that means they have gained knowledge and instruction at a college.

the encyclopaedia of pedagogy and informal education

What is education? A definition and discussion

Education is the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning and change undertaken in the belief that we all should have the chance to share in life., mark k smith explores the meaning of education and suggests it is a process of being with others and inviting truth and possibility., contents : introduction • education – cultivating hopeful environments and relationships for learning • education, respect and wisdom • education – acting so all may share in life • conclusion – what is education • further reading and references • acknowledgements • how to cite this piece.

picture: Education by Claude Gillot (1673–1722). creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Introduction

When talking about education people often confuse it with schooling. Many think of places like schools or colleges when seeing or hearing the word. They might also look to particular jobs like teacher or tutor. The problem with this is that while looking to help people learn, the way a lot of schools and teachers operate is not necessarily something we can properly call education. They have chosen or fallen or been pushed into ‘schooling’ – trying to drill learning into people according to some plan often drawn up by others. Paulo Freire (1973) famously called this banking – making deposits of knowledge. Such ‘schooling’ too easily descends into treating learners like objects, things to be acted upon rather than people to be related to.

Education, as we understand it here, is a process of inviting truth and possibility, of encouraging and giving time to discovery. It is, as John Dewey (1916) put it, a social process – ‘a process of living and not a preparation for future living’. In this view educators look to learning and being with others rather than acting upon them. Their task is to educe (related to the Greek notion of educere ), to bring out or develop potential both in themselves and others. Such education is:

Deliberate and hopeful. It is learning we set out to make happen in the belief that we all can ‘be more’;
Informed, respectful and wise. A process of inviting truth and possibility.
Grounded in a desire that at all may flourish and share in life . It is a cooperative and inclusive activity that looks to help us to live our lives as well as we can.

In what follows we will try to answer the question ‘what is education?’ by exploring these dimensions and the processes involved.

Education – cultivating hopeful environments and relationships for learning

It is often said that we are learning all the time and that we may not be conscious of it happening. Learning is both a process and an outcome. As a process, it is part of being and living in the world, part of the way our bodies work. As an outcome, it is a new understanding or appreciation of something.

In recent years, developments in neuroscience have shown us how learning takes place both in the body and as a social activity. We are social animals. As a result, educators need to focus on creating environments and relationships for learning rather than trying to drill knowledge into themselves and others.

Teachers are losing the education war because our adolescents are distracted by the social world. Naturally, the students don’t see it that way. It wasn’t their choice to get endless instruction on topics that don’t seem relevant to them. They desperately want to learn, but what they want to learn about is their social world—how it works and how they can secure a place in it that will maximize their social rewards and minimize the social pain they feel. Their brains are built to feel these strong social motivations and to use the mentalizing system to help them along. Evolutionarily, the social interest of adolescents is no distraction. Rather, it is the most important thing they can learn well. (Lieberman 2013: 282)

The cultivation of learning is a cognitive and emotional and social activity (Illeris 2002)

Alison Gopnik (2016) has provided a helpful way of understanding this orientation. It is that educators, pedagogues and practitioners need to be gardeners rather than carpenters. A key theme emerging from her research over the last 30 years or so that runs in parallel with Lieberman, is that children learn by actively engaging their social and physical environments – not by passively absorbing information. They learn from other people, not because they are being taught – but because people are doing and talking about interesting things. The emphasis in a lot of the literature about parenting (and teaching) presents the roles much like that of a carpenter.

You should pay some attention to the kind of material you are working with, and it may have some influence on what you try to do. But essentially your job is to shape that material into a final product that will fit the scheme you had in mind to begin with.

Instead, Gopnik argues, the evidence points to being a gardener.

When we garden, on the other hand, we create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish. It takes hard labor and the sweat of our brows, with a lot of exhausted digging and wallowing in manure. And as any gardener knows, our specific plans are always thwarted. The poppy comes up neon orange instead of pale pink, the rose that was supposed to climb the fence stubbornly remains a foot from the ground, black spot and rust and aphids can never be defeated.

Education is deliberate. We act with a purpose – to build understanding and judgement and enable action. We may do this for ourselves, for example, learning what different road signs mean so that we can get a license to drive; or watching wildlife programmes on television because we are interested in animal behaviour. This process is sometimes called self-education or teaching yourself. We join with the journey that the writer, presenter or expert is making, think about it and develop our understanding. Hopefully, we bring that process and understanding into play when we need to act. We also seek to encourage learning in others (while being open to learning ourselves). Examples here include parents and carers showing their children how to use a knife and fork or ride a bike; schoolteachers introducing students to a foreign language; and animators and pedagogues helping a group to work together.

Sometimes as educators, we have a clear idea of what we’d like to see achieved; at others, we do not and should not. In the case of the former, we might be working to a curriculum, have a session or lesson plan with clear objectives, and have a high degree of control over the learning environment. This is what we often mean by ‘formal education’. In the latter, for example, when working with a community group, the setting is theirs and, as educators, we are present as guests. This is an example of informal education and here two things are happening.

First, the group may well be clear on what it wants to achieve e.g. putting on an event, but unclear about what they need to learn to do it. They know learning is involved – it is something necessary to achieve what they want – but it is not the main focus. Such ‘incidental learning’ is not accidental. People know they need to learn something but cannot necessarily specify it in advance (Brookfield 1984).

Second, this learning activity works largely through conversation – and conversation takes unpredictable turns. It is a dialogical rather than curricula form of education.

In both forms, educators set out to create environments and relationships where people can explore their, and other’s, experiences of situations, ideas and feelings. This exploration lies, as John Dewey argued, at the heart of the ‘business of education’. Educators set out to emancipate and enlarge experience (1933: 340). How closely the subject matter is defined in advance, and by whom, differs from situation to situation. John Ellis (1990) has developed a useful continuum – arguing that most education involves a mix of the informal and formal, of conversation and curriculum (i.e. between points X and Y).

The informal-formal education continuum - John Ellis

Those that describe themselves as informal educators, social pedagogues or as animators of community learning and development tend to work towards the X; those working as subject teachers or lecturers tend to the Y. Educators when facilitating tutor groups might, overall, work somewhere in the middle.

Acting in hope

Underpinning intention is an attitude or virtue – hopefulness. As educators ‘we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know’ (hooks 2003: xiv) . In other words, we invite people to learn and act in the belief that change for the good is possible. This openness to possibility isn’t blind or over-optimistic. It looks to evidence and experience, and is born of an appreciation of the world’s limitations (Halpin 2003: 19-20).

We can quickly see how such hope is both a part of the fabric of education – and, for many, an aim of education. Mary Warnock (1986:182) puts it this way:

I think that of all the attributes that I would like to see in my children or in my pupils, the attribute of hope would come high, even top, of the list. To lose hope is to lose the capacity to want or desire anything; to lose, in fact, the wish to live. Hope is akin to energy, to curiosity, to the belief that things are worth doing. An education which leaves a child without hope is an education that has failed.

But hope is not easy to define or describe. It is:

An emotion . Hope, John Macquarrie (1978 11) suggests, ‘consists in an outgoing and trusting mood toward the environment’. We do not know what will happen but take a gamble. ‘It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk’ (Solnit 2016: 21).

A choice or intention to act . Hope ‘promotes affirmative courses of action’ (Macquarrie 1978: 11). Hope alone will not transform the world. Action ‘undertaken in that kind of naïveté’, wrote Paulo Freire (1994: 8), ‘is an excellent route to hopelessness, pessimism, and fatalism’. Hope and action are linked. Rebecca Solnit (2016: 22) put it this way, ‘Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope… To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable’.

An intellectual activity . Hope is not just feeling or striving, according to McQuarrie it has a cognitive or intellectual aspect. ‘[I]t carries in itself a definite way of understanding both ourselves – and the environing processes within which human life has its setting’ ( op. cit. ).

This provides us with a language to help make sense of things and to imagine change for the better – a ‘vocabulary of hope’. It helps us to critique the world as it is and our part in it, and not to just imagine change but also to plan it (Moltman 1967, 1971). It also allows us, and others, to ask questions of our hopes, to request evidence for our claims. (See, what is hope? ).

Education – being respectful, informed and wise

Education is wrapped up with who we are as learners and facilitators of learning – and how we are experienced by learners. In order to think about this, it is helpful to look back at a basic distinction made by Erich Fromm (1979), amongst others, between having and being. Fromm approaches these as fundamental modes of existence. He saw them as two different ways of understanding ourselves and the world in which we live.

Having is concerned with owning, possessing and controlling. In it we want to ‘make everybody and everything’, including ourselves, our property (Fromm 1979: 33). It looks to objects and material possessions.

Being is rooted in love according to Fromm. It is concerned with shared experience and productive activity. Rather than seeking to possess and control, in this mode, we engage with the world. We do not impose ourselves on others nor ‘interfere’ in their lives (see Smith and Smith 2008: 16-17).

These different orientations involve contrasting approaches to learning.

Students in the having mode must have but one aim; to hold onto what they have ‘learned’, either by entrusting it firmly to their memories or by carefully guarding their notes. They do not have to produce or create something new…. The process of learning has an entirely different quality for students in the being mode… Instead of being passive receptacles of words and ideas, they listen, they hear , and most important, they receive and they respond in an active, productive way. (Fromm 1979: 37-38)

In many ways, this difference mirrors that between education and schooling. Schooling entails transmitting knowledge in manageable lumps so it can be stored and then used so that students can pass tests and have qualifications. Education involves engaging with others and the world. It entails being with others in a particular way. Here I want to explore three aspects – being respectful, informed and wise.

Being respectful

The process of education flows from a basic orientation of respect – respect for truth, others and themselves, and the world. It is an attitude or feeling which is carried through into concrete action, into the way we treat people, for example. Respect, as R. S. Dillon (2014) has reminded us, is derived from the Latin respicere , meaning ‘to look back at’ or ‘to look again’ at something. In other words, when we respect something we value it enough to make it our focus and to try to see it for what it is, rather than what we might want it to be. It is so important that it calls for our recognition and our regard – and we choose to respond.

We can see this at work in our everyday relationships. When we think highly of someone we may well talk about respecting them – and listen carefully to what they say or value the example they give. Here, though, we are also concerned with a more abstract idea – that of moral worth or value. Rather than looking at why we respect this person or that, the interest is in why we should respect people in general (or truth, or creation, or ourselves).

First, we expect educators to hold truth dearly . We expect that they will look beneath the surface, try to challenge misrepresentation and lies, and be open to alternatives. They should display the ‘two basic virtues of truth’: sincerity and accuracy (Williams 2002: 11). There are strong religious reasons for this. Bearing false witness, within Christian traditions, can be seen as challenging the foundations of God’s covenant. There are also strongly practical reasons for truthfulness. Without it, the development of knowledge would not be possible – we could not evaluate one claim against another. Nor could we conduct much of life. For example, as Paul Seabright (2010) has argued, truthfulness allows us to trust strangers. In the process, we can build complex societies, trade and cooperate.

Educators, as with other respecters of truth, should do their best to acquire ‘true beliefs’ and to ensure what they say actually reveals what they believe (Williams 2002: 11). Their authority, ‘must be rooted in their truthfulness in both these respects: they take care, and they do not lie’ op. cit.).

Second, educators should display fundamental respect for others (and themselves) . There is a straightforward theological argument for this. There is also a fundamental philosophical argument for ‘respect for persons’. Irrespective of what they have done, the people they are or their social position, it is argued, people are deserving of some essential level of regard. The philosopher most closely associated with this idea is Immanuel Kant – and his thinking has become a central pillar of humanism. Kant’s position was that people were deserving of respect because they are people – free, rational beings. They are ends in themselves with an absolute dignity

Alongside respect for others comes respect for self. Without it, it is difficult to see how we can flourish – and whether we can be educators. Self-respect is not to be confused with qualities like self-esteem or self-confidence; rather it is to do with our intrinsic worth as a person and a sense of ourselves as mattering. It involves a ‘secure conviction that [our] conception of the good, [our] plan of life, is worth carrying out’ (Rawls 1972: 440). For some, respect for ourselves is simply the other side of the coin from respect for others. It flows from respect for persons. For others, like John Rawls, it is vital for happiness and must be supported as a matter of justice.

Third, educators should respect the Earth . This is sometimes talked about as respect for nature, or respect for all things or care for creation. Again there is a strong theological argument here – in much religious thinking humans are understood as stewards of the earth. Our task is to cultivate and care for it (see, for example, Genesis 2:15). However, there is also a strong case grounded in human experience. For example, Miller (2000) argues that ‘each person finds identity, meaning, and purpose in life through connections to the community, to the natural world, and to spiritual values such as compassion and peace’. Respect for the world is central to the thinking of those arguing for a more holistic vision of education and to the thinking of educationalists such as Montessori . Her vision of ‘cosmic education’ puts appreciating the wholeness of life at the core.

Since it has been seen to be necessary to give so much to the child, let us give him a vision of the whole universe. The universe is an imposing reality, and an answer to all questions. We shall walk together on this path of life, for all things are part of the universe, and are connected with each other to form one whole unity. This idea helps the mind of the child to become fixed, to stop wandering in an aimless quest for knowledge. He is satisfied, having found the universal centre of himself with all things’. (Montessori 2000)

Last, and certainly not least, there is a basic practical concern. We face an environmental crisis of catastrophic proportions. As Emmett (among many others) has pointed out, it is likely that we are looking at a global average rise of over four degrees Centigrade. This ‘will lead to runaway climate change, capable of tipping the planet into an entirely different state, rapidly. Earth would become a hell hole’ (2013: 143).

Being informed

To facilitate learning we must have some understanding of the subject matter being explored, and the impact study could have on those involved. In other words, facilitation is intelligent.

We expect, quite reasonably, that when people describe themselves as teachers or educators, they know something about the subjects they are talking about. In this respect, our ‘subject area’ as educators is wide. It can involve particular aspects of knowledge and activity such as those associated with maths or history. However, it is also concerned with happiness and relationships, the issues and problems of everyday life in communities, and questions around how people are best to live their lives. In some respects, it is wisdom that is required – not so much in the sense that we know a lot or are learned – but rather we are able to help people make good judgements about problems and situations.

We also assume that teachers and educators know how to help people learn. The forms of education we are exploring here are sophisticated. They can embrace the techniques of classroom management and of teaching to a curriculum that has been the mainstay of schooling. However, they move well beyond this into experiential learning, working with groups, and forms of working with individuals that draw upon insights from counselling and therapy.

In short, we look to teachers and educators as experts, We expect them to apply their expertise to help people learn. However, things don’t stop there. Many look for something more – wisdom.

Wisdom is not something that we can generally claim for ourselves – but a quality recognized by others. Sometimes when people are described as wise what is meant is that they are scholarly or learned. More often, I suspect, when others are described as ‘being wise’ it that people have experienced their questions or judgement helpful and sound when exploring a problem or difficult situation (see Smith and Smith 2008: 57-69). This entails:

appreciating what can make people flourish
being open to truth in its various guises and allowing subjects to speak to us
developing the capacity to reflect
being knowledgeable, especially about ourselves, around ‘what makes people tick’ and the systems of which we are a part
being discerning – able to evaluate and judge situations. ( op. cit. : 68)

This combination of qualities, when put alongside being respectful and informed, comes close to what Martin Buber talked about as the ‘real teacher’. The real teacher, he believed:

… teaches most successfully when he is not consciously trying to teach at all, but when he acts spontaneously out of his own life. Then he can gain the pupil’s confidence; he can convince the adolescent that there is human truth, that existence has a meaning. And when the pupil’s confidence has been won, ‘his resistance against being educated gives way to a singular happening: he accepts the educator as a person. He feels he may trust this man, that this man is taking part in his life, accepting him before desiring to influence him. And so he learns to ask…. (Hodes 1972: 136)

Picture: Dessiner le futur adulte by Alain Bachellier. Sourced from Flickr and reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/alainbachellier/537180464/

Education – acting so that all may share in life

Thus far in answering the question ‘what is education?’ we have seen how it can be thought of as the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning. Here we will explore the claim that education should be undertaken in the belief that all should have the chance to share in life. This commitment to the good of all and of each individual is central to the vision of education explored here, but it could be argued that it is possible to be involved in education without this. We could take out concern for others. We could just focus on process – the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning – and not state to whom this applies and the direction it takes.

Looking beyond process

First, we need to answer the question ‘if we act wisely, hopefully, and respectfully as educators do we need to have a further purpose?’ Our guide here will again be John Dewey. He approached the question a century ago by arguing that ‘the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth’ (Dewey 1916: 100). Education, for him, entailed the continuous ‘reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases the ability to direct the course of subsequent experience. (Dewey 1916: 76). His next step was to consider the social relationships in which this can take place and the degree of control that learners and educators have over the process. Just as Freire (1972) argued later, relationships for learning need to be mutual, and individual and social change possible.

In our search for aims in education, we are not concerned… with finding an end outside of the educative process to which education is subordinate. Our whole conception forbids. We are rather concerned with the contrast which exists when aims belong within the process in which they operate and when they are set up from without. And the latter state of affairs must obtain when social relationships are not equitably balanced. For in that case, some portions of the whole social group will find their aims determined by an external dictation; their aims will not arise from the free growth of their own experience, and their nominal aims will be means to more ulterior ends of others rather than truly their own. (Dewey 1916: 100-101)

In other words, where there are equitable relationships, control over the learning process, and the possibilities of fundamental change we needn’t look beyond the process. However, we have to work for much of the time in situations and societies where this level of democracy and social justice does not exist. Hence the need to make clear a wider purpose. Dewey (1916: 7) argued, thus, that our ‘chief business’ as educators is to enable people ‘to share in a common life’. I want to widen this and to argue that all should have a chance to share in life.

Having the chance to share in life

We will explore, briefly, three overlapping approaches to making the case – via religious belief, human rights and scientific exploration.

Religious belief. Historically it has been a religious rationale that has underpinned much thinking about this question. If we were to look at Catholic social teaching, for example, we find that at its heart lays a concern for human dignity . This starts from the position that, ‘human beings, created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-27), have by their very existence an inherent value, worth, and distinction’ (Groody 2007). Each life is considered sacred and cannot be ignored or excluded. As we saw earlier, Kant argued something similar with regard to ‘respect for persons’. All are worthy of respect and the chance to flourish.

To human dignity a concern for solidarity is often added (especially within contemporary Catholic social teaching). Solidarity:

… is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all. On Social Concern ( Sollicitudo rei Socialis . . . ), #38

Another element, fundamental to the formation of the groups, networks and associations necessary for the ‘common life’ that Dewey describes, is subsidiarity . This principle, which first found its institutional voice in a papal encyclical in 1881, holds that human affairs are best handled at the ‘lowest’ possible level, closest to those affected (Kaylor 2015). It is a principle that can both strengthen civil society and the possibility of more mutual relationships for learning.

Together, these can provide a powerful and inclusive rationale for looking beyond particular individuals or groups when thinking about educational activity.

Human rights. Beside religious arguments lie others that are born of agreed principle or norm rather than faith. Perhaps the best known of these relate to what have become known as human rights. The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights puts it this way:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 26 further states:

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms….

These fundamental and inalienable rights are the entitlement of all human beings regardless of their nation, location, language, religion, ethnic origin or any other status (Article 2).

Scientific exploration. Lastly, I want to look at the results of scientific investigation into our nature as humans. More specifically we need to reflect on what it means when humans are described as social animals.

As we have already seen there is a significant amount of research showing just how dependent we are in everyday life on having trusting relationships in a society. Without them even the most basic exchanges cannot take place. We also know that in those societies where there is stronger concern for others and relatively narrow gaps between rich and poor people are generally happier (see, for example, Halpern 2010). On the basis of this material we could make a case for educators to look to the needs and experiences of all. Political, social and economic institutions depend on mass participation or at least benign consent – and the detail of this has to be learnt. However, with our growing appreciation of how our brains work and with the development of, for example, social cognitive neuroscience, we have a different avenue for exploration. We look to the needs and experience of others because we are hard-wired to do so. As Matthew D. Lieberman (2013) has put it:

Our basic urges include the need to belong, right along with the need for food and water. Our pain and pleasure systems do not merely respond to sensory inputs that can produce physical harm and reward. They are also exquisitely tuned to the sweet and bitter tastes delivered from the social world—a world of connection and threat to connection. (Lieberman 2013: 299)

Our survival as a species is dependent upon on looking to the needs and experiences of others. We dependent upon:

Connecting: We have ‘evolved the capacity to feel social pains and pleasures, forever linking our well-being to our social connectedness. Infants embody this deep need to stay connected, but it is present through our entire lives’ ( op. cit. : 10) Mindreading: Primates have developed an unparalleled ability to understand the actions and thoughts of those around them, enhancing their ability to stay connected and interact strategically… This capacity allows humans to create groups that can implement nearly any idea and to anticipate the needs and wants of those around us, keeping our groups moving smoothly ( op. cit. : 10) Harmonizing: Although the self may appear to be a mechanism for distinguishing us from others and perhaps accentuating our selfishness, the self actually operates as a powerful force for social cohesiveness. Whereas connection is about our desire to be social, harmonizing refers to the neural adaptations that allow group beliefs and values to influence our own. ( op. cit. : 11)

One of the key issues around these processes is the extent to which they can act to become exclusionary i.e. people can become closely attached to one particular group, community or nation and begin to treat others as somehow lesser or alien. In so doing relationships that are necessary to our survival – and that of the planet – become compromised. We need to develop relationships that are both bonding and bridging (see social capital ) – and this involves being and interacting with others who may not share our interests and concerns.

Education is more than fostering understanding and an appreciation of emotions and feelings. It is also concerned with change – ‘with how people can act with understanding and sensitivity to improve their lives and those of others’ (Smith and Smith 2008: 104). As Karl Marx (1977: 157-8) famously put it ‘all social life is practical…. philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; ‘the point is to change it’. Developing an understanding of an experience or a situation is one thing, working out what is good and wanting to do something about it is quite another. ‘For appropriate action to occur there needs to be commitment’ (Smith and Smith 2008: 105).

This combination of reflection; looking to what might be good and making it our own; and seeking to change ourselves and the world we live in is what Freire (1973) talked about as praxis. It involves us, as educators, working with people to create and sustain environments and relationships where it is possible to:

Go back to experiences . Learning doesn’t take place in a vacuum. We have to look to the past as well as the present and the future. It is necessary to put things in their place by returning to, or recalling, events and happenings that seem relevant.
Attend and connect to feelings . Our ability to think and act is wrapped up with our feelings. Appreciating what might be going on for us (and for others) at a particular moment; thinking about the ways our emotions may be affecting things; and being open to what our instincts or intuitions are telling us are important elements of such reflection. (See Boud et. al. 1985).
Develop understandings . Alongside attending to feelings and experiences, we need to examine the theories and understandings we are using. We also need to build new interpretations where needed. We should be looking to integrating new knowledge into our conceptual framework.
Commit . Education is something ‘higher’ according to John Henry Newman. It is concerned not just with what we know and can do, but also with who we are, what we value, and our capacity to live life as well as we can . We need space to engage with these questions and help to appreciate the things we value. As we learn to frame our beliefs we can better appreciate how they breathe life into our relationships and encounters, become our own, and move us to act.
Act . Education is forward-looking and hopeful. It looks to change for the better. In the end our efforts at facilitating learning have to be judged by the extent to which they further the capacity to flourish and to share in life. For this reason we need also to attend to the concrete, the actual steps that can be taken to improve things.

As such education is a deeply practical activity – something that we can do for ourselves (what we could call self-education), and with others.

Conclusion – so what is education?

It is in this way that we end up with a definition of education as ‘the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning undertaken in the belief that all should have the chance to share in life’. What does education involve?

We can begin with what Aristotle discusses as hexis – a readiness to sense and know. This is a state – or what Joe Sachs (2001) talks about as an ‘active condition’. It allows us to take a step forward – both in terms of the processes discussed above, and in what we might seek to do when working with learners and participants. Such qualities can be seen as being at the core of the haltung and processes of pedagogues and educators (see below). There is a strong emphasis upon being in touch with feelings, attending to intuitions and seeking evidence to confirm or question what we might be sensing. A further element is also present – a concern not to take things for granted or at their face value (See, also, Pierre Bourdieu on education , Bourdieu 1972|1977: 214 n1).

Beyond that, we can see a guiding eidos or leading idea. This is the belief that all share in life and a picture of what might allow people to be happy and flourish. Alongside is a disposition or haltung (a concern to act respectfully, knowledgeably and wisely) and interaction (joining with others to build relationships and environments for learning). Finally, there is praxis – informed, committed action (Carr and Kemmis 1986; Grundy 1987).

The process of education

At first glance, this way of answering the question ‘what is education?’ – with its roots in the thinking of Aristotle , Rousseau , Pestalozzi and Dewey (to name a few) – is part of the progressive tradition of educational practice. It seems very different from ‘formal tradition’ or ‘traditional education’.

If there is a core theme to the formal position it is that education is about passing on information; for formalists, culture and civilization represent a store of ideas and wisdom which have to be handed on to new generations. Teaching is at the heart of this transmission; and the process of transmission is education…

While progressive educators stress the child’s development from within, formalists put the emphasis, by contrast, on formation from without— formation that comes from immersion in the knowledge, ideas, beliefs, concepts, and visions of society, culture, civilization. There are, one might say, conservative and liberal interpretations of this world view— the conservative putting the emphasis on transmission itself, on telling, and the liberal putting the emphasis more on induction, on initiation by involvement with culture’s established ideas.(Thomas 2013: 25-26).

As both Thomas and Dewey (1938: 17-23) have argued, these distinctions are problematic. A lot of the debate is either really about education being turned, or slipping, into something else, or reflecting a lack of balance between the informal and formal.

In the ‘formal tradition’ problems often occur where people are treated as objects to be worked on or ‘moulded’ rather than as participants and creators i.e. where education slips into ‘schooling’.

In the ‘progressive tradition’ issues frequently arise where the nature of experience is neglected or handled incompetently. Some experiences are damaging and ‘mis-educative’. They can arrest or distort ‘the growth of further experience’ (Dewey 1938: 25). The problem often comes when education drifts or moves into entertainment or containment. Involvement in the immediate activity is the central concern and little attention is given to expanding horizons, nor to reflection, commitment and creating change.

The answer to the question ‘what is education?’ given here can apply to both those ‘informal’ forms that are driven and rooted in conversation – and to more formal approaches involving a curriculum. The choice is not between what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ – but rather what is appropriate for people in this situation or that. There are times to use transmission and direct teaching as methods, and moments for exploration, experience and action. It is all about getting the mix right and framing it within the guiding eidos and disposition of education.

Definition of education

instruction

Examples of education in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'education.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1531, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

Phrases Containing education

adult education
bilingual education
compensatory education
continuing education
counter - education
distance education
further education
higher education
physical education
self - education
sex education
special education
tertiary education

Articles Related to education

9 Slang Words With Academic Origins

Class is in session.

Back to School? Time For Some Pedagogy.

But What is It?

Back to School Vocabulary

Word lookups that spike in September

Dictionary Entries Near education

educational psychology

Cite this Entry

“Education.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/education. Accessed 1 Sep. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of education, more from merriam-webster on education.

Nglish: Translation of education for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of education for Arabic Speakers

Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!

Play Quordle: Guess all four words in a limited number of tries. Each of your guesses must be a real 5-letter word.

Can you solve 4 words at once?

Word of the day.

See Definitions and Examples »

Get Word of the Day daily email!

Popular in Grammar & Usage

Plural and possessive names: a guide, 31 useful rhetorical devices, more commonly misspelled words, why does english have so many silent letters, your vs. you're: how to use them correctly, popular in wordplay, 8 words for lesser-known musical instruments, it's a scorcher words for the summer heat, 7 shakespearean insults to make life more interesting, birds say the darndest things, 10 words from taylor swift songs (merriam's version), games & quizzes.

Play Blossom: Solve today's spelling word game by finding as many words as you can using just 7 letters. Longer words score more points.

Britannica Homepage
Ask the Editor
Word of the Day
Core Vocabulary
Most Popular
Browse the Dictionary
My Saved Words
education (noun)
adult education (noun)
continuing education (noun)
further education (noun)
higher education (noun)
physical education (noun)
sex education (noun)
special education (noun)
The school is devoted to the education of children with reading difficulties.
a college education
She received her education at private schools.
The applicants had comparable educations .
He had little formal education . [= schooling ]
She earned her master's degree in education .
a school of education

small broken pieces

About Us & Legal Info
Partner Program
Privacy Notice
Terms of Use
Pronunciation Symbols

Our Mission

What Is Education For?

Read an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson, which calls for redesigning education for the future.

What is education for? As it happens, people differ sharply on this question. It is what is known as an “essentially contested concept.” Like “democracy” and “justice,” “education” means different things to different people. Various factors can contribute to a person’s understanding of the purpose of education, including their background and circumstances. It is also inflected by how they view related issues such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. Still, not having an agreed-upon definition of education doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it or do anything about it.

We just need to be clear on terms. There are a few terms that are often confused or used interchangeably—“learning,” “education,” “training,” and “school”—but there are important differences between them. Learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. Education is an organized system of learning. Training is a type of education that is focused on learning specific skills. A school is a community of learners: a group that comes together to learn with and from each other. It is vital that we differentiate these terms: children love to learn, they do it naturally; many have a hard time with education, and some have big problems with school.

There are many assumptions of compulsory education. One is that young people need to know, understand, and be able to do certain things that they most likely would not if they were left to their own devices. What these things are and how best to ensure students learn them are complicated and often controversial issues. Another assumption is that compulsory education is a preparation for what will come afterward, like getting a good job or going on to higher education.

So, what does it mean to be educated now? Well, I believe that education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

This core purpose of education can be broken down into four basic purposes.

Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided. There is a deep correlation between our experience of the world around us and how we feel. As we explored in the previous chapters, all individuals have unique strengths and weaknesses, outlooks and personalities. Students do not come in standard physical shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. They all have their own aptitudes and dispositions and different ways of understanding things. Education is therefore deeply personal. It is about cultivating the minds and hearts of living people. Engaging them as individuals is at the heart of raising achievement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Many of the deepest problems in current systems of education result from losing sight of this basic principle.

Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others. There are various definitions of culture, but in this context the most appropriate is “the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups.” To put it more bluntly, it is “the way we do things around here.” Education is one of the ways that communities pass on their values from one generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences. For others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance. As the world becomes more crowded and connected, it is becoming more complex culturally. Living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative.

There should be three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures.

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent. This is one of the reasons governments take such a keen interest in education: they know that an educated workforce is essential to creating economic prosperity. Leaders of the Industrial Revolution knew that education was critical to creating the types of workforce they required, too. But the world of work has changed so profoundly since then, and continues to do so at an ever-quickening pace. We know that many of the jobs of previous decades are disappearing and being rapidly replaced by contemporary counterparts. It is almost impossible to predict the direction of advancing technologies, and where they will take us.

How can schools prepare students to navigate this ever-changing economic landscape? They must connect students with their unique talents and interests, dissolve the division between academic and vocational programs, and foster practical partnerships between schools and the world of work, so that young people can experience working environments as part of their education, not simply when it is time for them to enter the labor market.

Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens. We live in densely woven social systems. The benefits we derive from them depend on our working together to sustain them. The empowerment of individuals has to be balanced by practicing the values and responsibilities of collective life, and of democracy in particular. Our freedoms in democratic societies are not automatic. They come from centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy and those who foment sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Those struggles are far from over. As John Dewey observed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

For a democratic society to function, it depends upon the majority of its people to be active within the democratic process. In many democracies, this is increasingly not the case. Schools should engage students in becoming active, and proactive, democratic participants. An academic civics course will scratch the surface, but to nurture a deeply rooted respect for democracy, it is essential to give young people real-life democratic experiences long before they come of age to vote.

Eight Core Competencies

The conventional curriculum is based on a collection of separate subjects. These are prioritized according to beliefs around the limited understanding of intelligence we discussed in the previous chapter, as well as what is deemed to be important later in life. The idea of “subjects” suggests that each subject, whether mathematics, science, art, or language, stands completely separate from all the other subjects. This is problematic. Mathematics, for example, is not defined only by propositional knowledge; it is a combination of types of knowledge, including concepts, processes, and methods as well as propositional knowledge. This is also true of science, art, and languages, and of all other subjects. It is therefore much more useful to focus on the concept of disciplines rather than subjects.

Disciplines are fluid; they constantly merge and collaborate. In focusing on disciplines rather than subjects we can also explore the concept of interdisciplinary learning. This is a much more holistic approach that mirrors real life more closely—it is rare that activities outside of school are as clearly segregated as conventional curriculums suggest. A journalist writing an article, for example, must be able to call upon skills of conversation, deductive reasoning, literacy, and social sciences. A surgeon must understand the academic concept of the patient’s condition, as well as the practical application of the appropriate procedure. At least, we would certainly hope this is the case should we find ourselves being wheeled into surgery.

The concept of disciplines brings us to a better starting point when planning the curriculum, which is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. The four purposes above suggest eight core competencies that, if properly integrated into education, will equip students who leave school to engage in the economic, cultural, social, and personal challenges they will inevitably face in their lives. These competencies are curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. Rather than be triggered by age, they should be interwoven from the beginning of a student’s educational journey and nurtured throughout.

From Imagine If: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D and Kate Robinson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Sir Kenneth Robinson and Kate Robinson.

What is Education? : Meaning, Concept, Aims & Objectives of Education

“The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.” -Rabindranath Tagore.

Introduction: Education is the cornerstone of human development and progress, an enduring journey that empowers individuals with knowledge, skills, and wisdom to navigate life’s challenges and opportunities. It is a transformative process that extends far beyond the confines of classrooms, as it shapes the essence of who we are and who we become. Education equips us with the tools to understand the world, fostering critical thinking, creativity, and a sense of curiosity that fuels continuous growth. From early childhood to adulthood, pursuing knowledge enriches lives, ignites aspirations, and lays the groundwork for a brighter and more enlightened future for individuals and society.

1.1 Concept of Education:

The concept of education is multi-faceted, encompassing a broad range of principles, practices, and philosophies to facilitate the growth and development of individuals and society. Education is the intentional process of imparting knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes to individuals, empowering them to navigate life successfully and contribute meaningfully to the world around them. It is not limited to formal institutions but extends to informal and lifelong learning experiences. Education seeks to nurture intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, and emotional intelligence, equipping individuals with the tools to adapt to change, solve problems, and make informed decisions. Moreover, proper education emphasizes character development, promoting ethical behavior, empathy, and a sense of responsibility towards others and the environment. As a transformative force, education has the power to break barriers, bridge gaps, and foster a more inclusive and equitable society. Its ultimate goal is to cultivate well-rounded individuals who can lead fulfilling lives and actively contribute to the betterment of humanity.

1.2 What is Education?

Education is a transformative journey that shapes the very essence of human existence. The beacon illuminates the path of knowledge, leading individuals to discover the world’s wonders and unlock their vast potential. More than a mere transfer of information, education is the key that opens doors to opportunities, empowers minds, and transforms lives.

At its core, education seeks to equip individuals with the tools and skills they need to navigate the complexities of life. From the early stages of childhood, education lays the foundation for intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and problem-solving abilities. It encourages young minds to question, explore, and make sense of the world around them. Through interactive and experiential learning methodologies, students are encouraged to participate actively in their educational journey, fostering a lifelong love for learning.

As individuals progress through the different levels of education, they encounter a diverse range of subjects and disciplines. From mathematics to literature, science to arts, education offers a holistic approach that nurtures creativity and fosters a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of knowledge . Through this diverse exposure, students can discover their passions and interests, leading to specialized areas of study that align with their unique talents. Beyond acquiring knowledge, education plays a pivotal role in character development and social-emotional intelligence. It instills values of empathy, compassion, and tolerance, encouraging individuals to embrace diversity and respect others’ perspectives. Education cultivates a sense of responsibility and citizenship through teamwork, collaborative projects, and community engagement, shaping well-rounded individuals who contribute positively to their communities and society.

Education is not limited to formal institutions; it extends to informal and experiential learning. In today’s interconnected world, technology has become an indispensable tool in education, enabling access to information and learning resources from every corner of the globe. Online courses, virtual classrooms, and educational platforms have democratized education, making it accessible to learners of all ages and backgrounds. Moreover, education is a force for empowerment and social mobility. It breaks down barriers, providing opportunities for individuals to overcome adversity and pursue their dreams. Education catalyzes economic development, driving innovation and creating a skilled workforce that fuels progress and prosperity.

While education brings many opportunities, it also faces challenges that demand our collective attention. Disparities in access to quality education, particularly in marginalized communities, must be addressed. Outdated curricula and teaching methods must be modernized to align with the needs of the ever-evolving world. Furthermore, the emphasis should be on nurturing critical thinking and creativity rather than rote memorization.

1.3 Importance of Education.

Education is often hailed as the cornerstone of personal and societal development, a force capable of transforming lives and shaping the trajectory of nations. Beyond the confines of classrooms and lecture halls, the importance of education resonates across various facets of human existence, contributing to individual empowerment, economic prosperity, and the cultivation of enlightened societies. Here are some key aspects highlighting the importance of education:

Empowerment Through Knowledge: Education empowers individuals by imparting knowledge and honing critical thinking skills. It equips people with the tools needed to navigate the complexities of life, make informed decisions, and embrace a lifelong learning journey. Education serves as a catalyst for intellectual growth, enabling individuals to unlock their full potential and contribute meaningfully to society.
Career Opportunities and Economic Prosperity: One of the tangible outcomes of _ education is broadening career opportunities. Individuals acquire specialized knowledge and skills and become better positioned to access various professions. Moreover, education is intrinsically linked to economic prosperity, with studies consistently demonstrating a positive correlation between higher levels of education and increased earning potential. A well-educated workforce is a crucial driver of economic growth, innovation, and competitiveness on the global stage.
Social Mobility and Inclusivity: Education _ is a powerful tool for social mobility, offering individuals a pathway to transcend socio-economic barriers. By providing equal access to quality education, societies can break the cycle of poverty and promote inclusivity. Education fosters a meritocratic society where individuals are judged based on their abilities and contributions rather than their background or circumstances of birth.
Civic Engagement and Responsible Citizenship: Informed citizens are the bedrock of a thriving democracy. Education _ instills a sense of civic responsibility, encouraging individuals to participate actively in the democratic processes that govern their lives. A well-educated populace is more likely to engage in informed debate, make judicious decisions at the ballot box, and contribute to shaping just and equitable societies.
Cultural Understanding and Tolerance: Education _ transcends borders, fostering cultural understanding and tolerance. Exposure to diverse perspectives, histories, and traditions nurtures a global mindset, reducing prejudices and promoting harmony in an interconnected world. In classrooms where students from various backgrounds unite, education becomes a powerful tool for breaking down cultural barriers and building bridges of understanding.
Innovation and Progress: The nexus between education and innovation is undeniable. Education cultivates creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills, laying the groundwork for advancements in science, technology, and various fields. Nations with robust educational systems are at the forefront of innovation, driving progress and shaping the future through breakthrough discoveries and inventions.

The importance of education cannot be overstated. It is a transformative force that shapes individuals and societies, fostering personal growth, economic prosperity, and social cohesion. As we recognize education’s pivotal role in building a better world, we must invest in inclusive and quality education for all, ensuring its benefits are accessible to every corner of the globe. By doing so, we pave the way for a future where education continues to be the beacon lighting the path toward progress, enlightenment, and a more equitable world.

1.4 Types of Education:

Education encompasses formal and informal learning experiences, each contributing to an individual’s growth and development.

1.4.1 Formal Education:

Formal education stands as the bedrock of societal progress, offering structured and systematic learning experiences that shape the minds of individuals and contribute to the overall development of communities. In classrooms and lecture halls, within the walls of schools and universities, formal education unfolds as a dynamic process that equips learners with knowledge, skills, and qualifications. Here are key aspects of formal education:

Structured Curriculum: One of the defining features of formal education is its reliance on a structured curriculum. A carefully designed syllabus outlines the subjects, topics, and learning objectives, providing a roadmap for students to navigate various fields of knowledge. This structured approach ensures a comprehensive and well-rounded education covering various disciplines.
Certification and Degrees: Formal education culminates in attaining certifications, diplomas, or degrees, serving as tangible proof of an individual’s educational accomplishments. These credentials carry significant weight in the professional realm, influencing career opportunities and acting as a gateway to specialized fields. Pursuing degrees also fosters a culture of academic achievement and lifelong learning.
Educational Institutions: Formal education predominantly occurs within educational institutions, from primary schools to universities. These institutions serve as organized hubs of learning, equipped with dedicated spaces for classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and extracurricular activities. These institutions’ physical and social infrastructure contributes to a conducive environment for intellectual growth.
Trained Educators: Central to formal education is the role of trained educators. Teachers, professors, and instructors bring expertise and pedagogical skills to learning. Their guidance, mentorship, and facilitation of classroom discussions play a pivotal role in shaping the educational experience and inspiring students to delve deeper into their studies.
Standardized Assessments: Assessment is an integral component of formal education, systematically gauging students’ understanding of the material. Standardized assessments and examinations serve as benchmarks for academic performance, enabling educators to evaluate progress and identify areas for improvement. These assessments contribute to the objectivity and consistency of the educational system.
Academic Progression and Specialization: Formal education is organized into grade levels, each representing a stage of academic progression. Advancement through these levels is based on completing coursework and examinations. As students advance, they often can specialize in specific disciplines, allowing for in-depth exploration of subjects aligned with their interests and career aspirations.
Government Regulations and Standards: Formal education is subject to government regulations and standards that ensure the quality and consistency of educational programs. Accreditation processes, curricular guidelines, and teacher certification requirements are established to uphold the educational system’s integrity and meet society’s evolving needs.
Socialization and Peer Interaction: Educational institutions provide a structured socialization and peer interaction setting. Beyond academic learning, students develop essential social skills, teamwork, and a sense of community. The diverse interactions within the educational environment contribute to the holistic development of individuals.
Preparation for Future Careers: One of the primary objectives of formal education is to prepare individuals for future careers. It equips students with the knowledge, skills, and competencies needed in the workforce. The link between formal education and career readiness is crucial for addressing the demands of a rapidly evolving job market.
Global Standards and Mobility: Formal education adheres to global standards, facilitating educational mobility and the recognition of qualifications internationally. This interconnectedness is fundamental as individuals pursue educational opportunities or careers in different countries, contributing to a global pool of knowledge and talent.

Formal education is a cornerstone of personal and societal development, providing a structured framework for intellectual growth, skill development, and the pursuit of knowledge. Its impact reverberates across generations, shaping the workforce, fostering innovation, and contributing to societies’ cultural and intellectual richness worldwide. As we recognize the importance of formal education, it is essential to complement it with a commitment to inclusivity, accessibility, and the promotion of lifelong learning, ensuring that the benefits of education are accessible to all, regardless of background or circumstance.

1.4.2 Informal Education:

While formal education provides a structured and systematic approach to learning, the informal realm offers a dynamic, learner-driven journey that extends far beyond the confines of traditional classrooms. Informal education, characterized by its spontaneity and diversity, is crucial in shaping individuals, fostering personal development, and complementing the structured knowledge gained through formal channels. Here are key aspects of in-formal education:

Everyday Learning Experiences: Informal education thrives in the fabric of everyday life. From family interactions and community engagements to personal experiences and encounters with the world, informal learning is seamlessly woven into the tapestry of our daily existence. It encompasses the skills acquired through observation, trial and error, and knowledge absorption from the situations encountered in the real world.
Hands-On Learning and Experiential Wisdom: At the heart of informal education lies the hands-on experience, an invaluable teacher in its own right. Individuals glean experiential wisdom beyond textbook knowledge, whether learning a craft, navigating a new city, or experimenting with a hobby. This type of learning imparts practical skills and nurtures problem-solving abilities and a resilient mindset.
Self-Directed Exploration: One of the distinguishing features of informal education is its self-directed nature. Individuals have the autonomy to pursue their passions, delve into topics of personal interest, and chart their learning journeys. This learner-centric approach fosters a love for learning and cultivates a sense of curiosity that extends beyond the boundaries of formal curricula.
Mentorship and Role Models: Informal education often unfolds in the shadow of mentorship and the influence of role models. Whether it’s a family member, a community leader, or a respected colleague, informal learning benefits from the guidance and insights shared by those with more experience. This mentor-mentee relationship contributes significantly to skill development and personal growth.
Media and Technology: The digital age has ushered in new dimensions of informal education through the accessibility of online resources, educational platforms, and interactive media. Blogs, podcasts, video tutorials, and social media create a vast landscape for informal learning, allowing individuals to explore diverse topics, connect with global communities, and engage in self-paced learning.
Cultural Transmission: Informal education is a conduit for transmitting culture, traditions, and societal norms. Through storytelling, oral traditions, and community celebrations, individuals absorb a deep understanding of their cultural heritage, fostering a sense of identity and connection to their roots.
Problem-Solving and Critical Thinking: The informal learning space incubates problem-solving skills and critical thinking. Whether faced with personal challenges or navigating professional scenarios, individuals who engage in informal learning tend to develop adaptive thinking and approach problems creatively and resourceful.
Community Learning and Collaboration: Informal education often occurs within communities. Shared knowledge, collaborative problem-solving, and collective learning experiences contribute to the social fabric of groups. Learning within a community fosters a sense of belonging and emphasizes the importance of collaboration in the learning process.
Lifelong Learning Mindset: At its core, informal education nurtures a lifelong learning mindset. Learning doesn’t end with formal degrees or certificates; it continues throughout life. Embracing the opportunities for informal learning allows individuals to adapt to changing circumstances, stay relevant in evolving fields, and continue growing intellectually.

With its diverse and dynamic nature, informal education complements and enriches the structured learning provided by formal education. From the experiential wisdom gained through hands-on activities to the cultural richness transmitted through storytelling, informal learning contributes significantly to personal development and lifelong learning. As we navigate a world of ever-evolving knowledge, the recognition and appreciation of informal education empower individuals to embark on a journey of continuous discovery, curiosity, and self-directed growth.

1.5 Functions of Education:

Education is a cornerstone of human development and progress, serving numerous essential functions that shape individuals and societies. From acquiring knowledge to nurturing character, education is pivotal in empowering minds and building cohesive, thriving communities. It serves several essential functions contributing to personal, social, and economic development. These functions play a crucial role in shaping individuals and societies. Here are some key functions of education:

Knowledge Acquisition: At its core, education _ imparts knowledge and skills form the foundation of intellectual growth. From basic literacy and numeracy to advanced subject expertise, education equips individuals with the tools they need to comprehend the world and make informed decisions.
Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving: Education _ fosters critical thinking abilities, encouraging individuals to analyze, evaluate, and question information critically. It nurtures problem-solving skills, enabling learners to tackle complex challenges with creativity and ingenuity.
Character Development: Beyond academics, education _ plays a vital role in shaping one’s character. It instills empathy, honesty, responsibility, and respect for others. These moral principles guide individuals in their interactions with others and inform their ethical decision-making.
Socialization and Communication: Education _ provides a platform for social interaction, helping individuals develop strong communication and interpersonal skills. It encourages teamwork, collaboration, and the ability to express ideas effectively.
Preparation for Citizenship: Education _ prepares individuals to be active and responsible citizens in their societies. It imparts knowledge about civic rights and duties, fostering a sense of civic responsibility and encouraging community engagement.
Cultural Transmission: Education _ serves as a conduit for cultural transmission, preserving and passing down traditions, customs, and historical knowledge from one generation to another. It nurtures a sense of identity and fosters an appreciation for diverse cultures.
Economic Growth and Productivity: A well-educated workforce is essential for economic growth and productivity. Education equips individuals with the skills to contribute to the labor market, drive innovation, and enhance productivity.
Social Mobility and Equality: Education _ acts as a powerful tool for social mobility, providing equal opportunities for individuals from diverse backgrounds to improve their circumstances and break the cycle of poverty. It promotes social equity and inclusivity.
Health and Well-being: Education _ promotes health literacy, teaching individuals about healthy practices, disease prevention, and access to healthcare resources. It empowers individuals to make informed decisions about their well-being.
Environmental Awareness: Education _ fosters environmental consciousness and an understanding of sustainability. It encourages responsible behavior towards the environment and prepares individuals to address environmental challenges.
Lifelong Learning and Adaptability: Education _ instills a desire for lifelong learning and personal development. It equips individuals with adaptability skills, enabling them to cope with changes and challenges.
Innovation and Progress: Education _ is a catalyst for innovation and societal progress. It nurtures talents and skills that drive scientific discoveries, technological advancements, and improvements in various fields.
Reduction of Social Inequities: Education _ plays a vital role in reducing social inequalities by providing equal opportunities for individuals to improve their lives and access better opportunities.

Education serves as the bedrock of individual growth and societal advancement. It empowers minds with knowledge, fosters critical thinking, and instills values that guide ethical decision-making. Education prepares individuals to be active citizens, contributing to the well-being of their communities and embracing diversity. It is the key that unlocks potential, bridging gaps, and building a better, more equitable world for future generations. As societies invest in education and recognize its multifaceted functions, they sow the seeds of progress and lay the foundation for a brighter, more compassionate future.

1.6 How Education Improves the Quality of Life.

Education _ is a transformative force that goes beyond the confines of classrooms, enriching lives and elevating societies. Its impact on the quality of life is profound, touching every aspect of an individual’s well-being and contributing to the advancement of communities. Let us explore how education improves the quality of life in diverse and meaningful ways:

Knowledge as Empowerment: Education _ is the key to unlocking the gates of knowledge, and with knowledge comes empowerment. Individuals with education are equipped to navigate the complexities of the modern world. From basic literacy to advanced degrees, education empowers minds to think critically, make informed decisions, and actively engage with their surroundings.
Economic Empowerment and Stability: One of the undeniable benefits of education is its impact on economic well-being. Education is a pathway to acquiring skills and expertise, enhancing employability, and opening doors to diverse career opportunities. The correlation between higher levels of education and increased earning potential contributes to personal prosperity and economic stability on a broader scale.
Health and Well-being: Education extends beyond the cognitive realm, influencing physical and mental health. Health education, a component of a comprehensive learning experience, fosters awareness of healthy lifestyle choices. Educated individuals are more likely to adopt preventive healthcare measures, leading to improved well-being, reduced healthcare costs, and an overall higher quality of life.
Cognitive Skills and Critical Thinking: Education is not solely about absorbing information; it is about honing cognitive skills and fostering critical thinking. Analytical skills developed through education enable individuals to assess situations, solve problems, and make informed decisions. This intellectual agility contributes to adaptability and resilience in facing life’s challenges.
Social Harmony and Civic Engagement: A well-educated populace is the bedrock of social harmony. Education instills a sense of civic responsibility and active participation in community affairs. Informed citizens are more likely to engage in constructive dialogue, contribute to social initiatives, and work towards improving their communities, creating a harmonious and interconnected society.
Lifelong Learning for Continuous Growth: Education is a journey, not a destination. Lifelong learning is a philosophy that embraces the idea of continuous growth and adaptability. In a rapidly changing world, individuals committed to ongoing education are better equipped to navigate evolving landscapes, seize opportunities, and maintain a sense of curiosity that enriches their lives.
Cultural Enrichment and Global Awareness: Education exposes individuals to diverse ideas, perspectives, and cultures. This cultural enrichment fosters tolerance, understanding, and appreciation for diversity. An educated populace is better equipped to navigate cross-cultural interactions in a globalized world, promoting a more interconnected and harmonious global society.

As we reflect on the myriad ways education improves the quality of life, it becomes evident that its impact is far-reaching and transformative. From intellectual empowerment to economic prosperity, health, and social harmony, education is the cornerstone of individual and societal advancement. It is not merely a means to an end but a lifelong journey that enriches the human experience, paving the way for a brighter, more empowered, and fulfilling future. As we invest in education, we invest in humanity’s collective well-being and prosperity.

Reference Article:

Anandakrishnan, K. (2017). Development of multimedia courseware for teaching chemistry at higher secondary level. Alagappa University. http://hdl.handle.net/10603/202501
Meenakshi, C. (2017). Awareness of dreadful diseases and environmental pollution on the personal values of the college students. Alagappa University. http://hdl.handle.net/10603/202032

What is problem-based learning, how libraries transform problem-based learning environments, top benefits of elearning over traditional classrooms, communication barriers in virtual classrooms, the fundamental purpose of education in society., strategies to build on student collaboration in the classroom.

Pingback: The Purpose of Higher Education - Library and Information Science Network

Pingback: Meaning, purpose & objectives of of Higher Education - Library and Information Science Network

Pingback: Characteristics and advantages of Audio-Visual Aids - Library and Information Science Network

Pingback: Characteristics and advantages of Audio-Visual Aids - Library & Information Science Network

Pingback: Meaning, purpose & objectives of of Higher Education - Library & Information Science Network

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.

What is the Concept, meaning and Characteristics of Education?

Back to: Philosophical Foundation of Education – Unit 1

What is the Concept, Meaning and characteristics of education ?

Introduction

Education is a fundamental aspect of human development and plays a crucial role in shaping individuals and societies. It is a lifelong process that involves the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes through various formal and informal means. The concept, meaning, and characteristics of education are multifaceted and have evolved over time to meet the changing needs of individuals and societies.

The concept of education can be traced back to ancient civilizations, where it was primarily focused on transmitting cultural and societal norms from one generation to another. However, the meaning of education has expanded significantly over the years and now encompasses a broader range of objectives. Today, education is seen as a means of empowering individuals, fostering personal and social development, and promoting economic growth and social cohesion.

One of the key characteristics of education is its transformative nature. Education has the power to change individuals’ lives by equipping them with the necessary knowledge and skills to navigate the complexities of the world. It enables individuals to think critically, solve problems, and make informed decisions. Education also fosters personal growth by promoting self-awareness, self-confidence, and a sense of purpose.

Another characteristic of education is its universal nature. Education is a fundamental right for all individuals, regardless of their age, gender, ethnicity, or socio-economic background. It is essential for promoting social justice and reducing inequalities. Education provides equal opportunities for individuals to develop their full potential and contribute to society. It also plays a crucial role in promoting social mobility and breaking the cycle of poverty.

Education is also a lifelong process that extends beyond formal schooling. While formal education, such as primary, secondary, and tertiary education, is crucial, education also occurs through informal means such as family, community, and workplace. Informal education complements formal education by providing practical skills, values, and attitudes that are necessary for everyday life. Lifelong learning is essential in today’s rapidly changing world, where individuals need to continuously update their knowledge and skills to adapt to new challenges and opportunities.

Furthermore, education is a collaborative and interactive process. It involves the active participation of learners, teachers, parents, and the community. Education is not limited to the transmission of knowledge from teachers to students but also involves the exchange of ideas, experiences, and perspectives. It encourages critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration, which are essential skills for the 21st-century workforce.

Education is also context-specific and reflects the cultural, social, and economic realities of a particular society. Different societies have different educational systems and approaches that are shaped by their values, beliefs, and priorities. Education is not a one-size-fits-all concept but should be tailored to meet the specific needs and aspirations of individuals and communities. It should be inclusive, flexible, and responsive to the diverse learning styles, abilities, and interests of learners.

Education is a fundamental pillar of human society, shaping individuals and fostering their intellectual, social, and emotional development. In this article, we delve into the concept, meaning, and characteristics of education. By understanding these key aspects, we can appreciate the transformative power of education and its role in shaping our lives and society.

Concept of Education :

The concept of education encompasses the systematic process of acquiring knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes through various formal and informal methods. It goes beyond the confines of traditional classrooms, extending into lifelong learning and personal growth. Education provides individuals with the tools to understand the world, think critically, and participate effectively in society. It empowers individuals to develop their talents, pursue their passions, and contribute meaningfully to their communities.

Meaning of Education :

Education holds different meanings for different people. At its core, education is about acquiring knowledge and skills, but it also encompasses personal growth, character development, and the pursuit of wisdom. Education equips individuals with the ability to analyze, interpret, and make informed decisions. It fosters curiosity, creativity, and a lifelong love of learning. Education is not limited to academic subjects; it embraces a broad spectrum of disciplines, including the arts, sciences, humanities, and vocational training. Ultimately, education enriches our lives, broadens our perspectives, and empowers us to adapt and thrive in an ever-changing world.

Nature of Education :

Education exhibits several key characteristics that shape its nature and impact. These include:

1. Formal Structure : Education often follows a structured framework, with institutions such as schools, colleges, and universities providing organized learning environments. Formal education is characterized by curriculum, assessments, and recognized qualifications.

2. Systematic Process : Education involves a systematic progression of learning, building upon foundational knowledge and skills. It follows a planned sequence, allowing individuals to develop a comprehensive understanding of various subjects.

3. Lifelong Learning : Education extends beyond the boundaries of formal schooling. It encompasses continuous learning throughout one’s life, promoting personal and professional development. Lifelong learning encourages individuals to adapt to new challenges and acquire new skills as societal needs evolve.

4. Holistic Development : Education aims to nurture the holistic development of individuals, encompassing intellectual, social, emotional, and physical aspects. It fosters critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, empathy, and ethical decision-making.

5. Individualized Approach : Recognizing the unique abilities and learning styles of individuals, education endeavors to provide personalized learning experiences. It acknowledges that each learner has distinct strengths, preferences, and needs, promoting inclusive and tailored instruction.

6. Global Perspective : Education acknowledges the interconnectedness of our world and encourages the understanding of diverse cultures, perspectives, and global issues. It fosters global citizenship, promoting tolerance, empathy, and cross-cultural communication.

Characteristics of Education:

Acquition of knowledge : Education is the process of facilitating learning, encompassing the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes.

2. Lifelong Journey : Education begins from birth and continues throughout life, occurring in formal and informal settings.

3. Transformation : Education has the power to shape individuals’ lives, empowering them to overcome obstacles and seize opportunities.

4. Personal Growth : Education fosters personal development, helping individuals discover their passions, develop talents, and fulfill their potential.

5. Social Cohesion : Education promotes a sense of community and inclusivity, cultivating values such as empathy, respect, and tolerance.

6. Cultural Exchange : Education exposes individuals to different cultures, perspectives, and experiences, fostering intercultural understanding and dialogue.

7. Skill Development : Education goes beyond academic knowledge, nurturing skills like critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, communication, and adaptability.

8. Lifelong Learning : Education extends beyond formal education, encouraging individuals to engage in continuous learning and acquire new skills throughout life.

9. Societal Progress : Education drives societal development by equipping individuals with the skills and knowledge needed for economic growth and social mobility.

10. Innovation : Education acts as a catalyst for innovation, enabling individuals to embrace new ideas, technologies, and advancements.

11. Active Citizenship : Education empowers individuals to become active participants in shaping their communities and making positive contributions to society.

12. Inclusive and Interconnected World : Education promotes inclusivity, understanding, and interconnectedness in a diverse global society.

13. Value-based Education : Education cultivates values like integrity, responsibility, and ethical behavior, fostering well-rounded individuals.

14. Accessible Education : Education should be accessible to all, regardless of gender, socio-economic background, or geographical location.

15. Teacher-Student Relationship : Education relies on a strong teacher-student relationship, where educators guide, inspire, and support learners.

16. Holistic Approach : Education takes into account the intellectual, emotional, social, and physical development of individuals.

17. Education Policy : Effective education policies and systems are crucial for ensuring quality education, equitable access, and continuous improvement.

18. Education and Sustainable Development : Education plays a vital role in promoting sustainable development by raising awareness of environmental issues and encouraging responsible practices.

19. Global Education : Education prepares individuals to be global citizens, fostering understanding, cooperation, and collaboration across borders.

20. Empowerment : Education empowers individuals to make informed decisions, critically analyze information, and actively participate in democratic processes.

Conclusion, education is a complex and multifaceted concept that encompasses the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes. It is a transformative, universal, lifelong, collaborative, and context-specific process. Education plays a crucial role in empowering individuals, fostering personal and social development, and promoting economic growth and social cohesion. It is a fundamental right for all individuals and is essential for promoting social justice, reducing inequalities, and breaking the cycle of poverty. Education is not limited to formal schooling but also occurs through informal means and involves the active participation of learners, teachers, parents, and the community.Education is a multifaceted concept that encompasses more than just the transmission of knowledge and skills. It empowers individuals, promotes personal growth, and cultivates a sense of responsibility towards society. Understanding the concept, meaning, and characteristics of education allows us to appreciate its transformative power and advocate for equitable access to quality education for all. As we continue to navigate an ever-changing world, education remains a cornerstone for progress, enlightenment, and the betterment of individuals and society as a whole.

Education is a lifelong journey that transforms individuals, fosters personal growth, promotes social cohesion, cultivates essential skills, drives societal progress, and prepares individuals to be active participants in shaping the world. It is a holistic process that goes beyond academic knowledge, emphasizing values, inclusivity, and lifelong learning.

1. What is the concept of education?

Education is a systematic process of acquiring knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes through various methods, such as instruction, study, and experience. It encompasses formal education (classroom-based), informal education (through life experiences), and non-formal education (structured learning outside traditional settings). The concept of education aims to foster personal and intellectual growth, preparing individuals for life’s challenges while fostering critical thinking and lifelong learning.

2. What is the meaning of education?

The meaning of education extends beyond mere knowledge acquisition. It encompasses the holistic development of individuals, including cognitive, emotional, social, and physical aspects. Education equips individuals with the necessary tools to navigate the complexities of the world, fostering personal growth, social mobility, and cultural understanding. Ultimately, education empowers individuals to contribute positively to society and lead fulfilling lives.

3. What are the characteristics of education?

Education possesses several key characteristics that distinguish it as a transformative process:

a) Formality: Education is often structured within formal institutions, such as schools, colleges, and universities, with predefined curricula and assessment methods.

b) Systematic: Education follows a planned and organized approach, progressing from foundational knowledge to advanced concepts, building upon previous learning.

c) Universal: Education is a fundamental right for all individuals, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background. It aims to provide equal opportunities for personal growth and development.

d) Lifelong: Education is a continuous journey that extends beyond formal education. It encourages individuals to engage in lifelong learning, adapting to technological advancements and societal changes.

e) Empowerment: Education empowers individuals by enhancing critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and equipping them with knowledge and tools necessary for personal and professional success.

f) Societal Impact: Education plays a crucial role in shaping societies, fostering social cohesion, economic prosperity, and cultural enrichment.

Conclusion:

Education, as a concept, carries immense significance in our lives and society. Through this article, we have explored the concept, meaning, and characteristics of education. It serves as a catalyst for personal growth, societal development, and empowerment. Education transcends boundaries, instilling knowledge, skills, and values in individuals, preparing them to navigate an ever-changing world. Embracing education as a lifelong journey empowers us to embrace new opportunities, challenge existing paradigms, and contribute meaningfully to our communities.

Table of Contents
Random Entry
Chronological
Editorial Information
About the SEP
Editorial Board
How to Cite the SEP
Special Characters
Advanced Tools
Support the SEP
PDFs for SEP Friends
Make a Donation
SEPIA for Libraries
Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

Friends PDF Preview
Author and Citation Info
Back to Top

Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

Adler, Jonathan E., 2002, Belief’s Own Ethics , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
–––, 2003, “Knowledge, Truth and Learning”, in Curren 2003: 285–304. doi:10.1002/9780470996454.ch21
Anderson, Elizabeth, 2007, “Fair Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Perspective”, Ethics , 117(4): 595–622. doi:10.1086/518806
Archambault, Reginald D. (ed.), 1965, Philosophical Analysis and Education , London: Routledge.
Audi, Robert, 2017, “Role Modelling and Reasons: Developmental and Normative Grounds of Moral Virtue”, Journal of Moral Philosophy , 14(6): 646–668. doi:10.1163/17455243-46810063
Baehr, Jason, 2011, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199604074.001.0001
––– (ed.), 2016, Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology , New York: Routledge.
Bailey, Richard, Robin Barrow, David Carr, and Christine McCarthy (eds), 2010, The SAGE Handbook of the Philosophy of Education , Los Angeles: Sage. doi:10.4135/9781446200872
Bailin, Sharon and Harvey Siegel, 2003, “Critical Thinking”, in Blake et al. 2003: 181–193. doi:10.1002/9780470996294.ch11
Ben-Porath, Sigal R., 2006. Citizenship Under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Blake, Nigel, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (eds.), 2003, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470996294
Brighouse, Harry, 2005, On Education , London: Routledge.
–––, 2009, “Moral and Political Aims of Education”, in Siegel 2009: 35–51.
Brighouse, Harry and Adam Swift, 2009, “Educational Equality versus Educational Adequacy: A Critique of Anderson and Satz”, Journal of Applied Philosophy , 26(2): 117–128. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5930.2009.00438.x
Bull, Barry L., 2008, Social Justice in Education: An Introduction , New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Burbules, Nicholas C., 1994, “Marxism and Educational Thought”, in The International Encyclopedia of Education , (Volume 6), Torsten Husén and T. Neville Postlethwaite (eds.), Oxford: Pergamon, second edition, pp. 3617–22.
Burnyeat, Myles F., 1980, “Aristotle on Learning to be Good”, in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics , Berkeley CA: University of California Press, pp. 69–92.
Callan, Eamonn, 1997, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy , Oxford: Clarendon Press. doi:10.1093/0198292589.001.0001
–––, 2006, “Love, Idolatry, and Patriotism”, Social Theory and Practice , 32(4): 525–546. doi:10.5840/soctheorpract200632430
Carr, David, 2003, Making Sense of Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Theory of Education and Teaching , London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Carter, J. Adam and Ben Kotzee, 2015, “Epistemology of Education”, Oxford Bibliographies Online , last modified: 26 October 2015.
Carter, J.Adam and Duncan Pritchard, 2017, “Epistemic Situationism, Epistemic Dependence, and the Epistemology of Education”, in Abrol Fairweather and Mark Alfano (eds.), Epistemic Situationism , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 168–191. doi:10.1093/oso/9780199688234.003.0010
Cartwright, Nancy D., 2013, Evidence: For Policy and Wheresoever Rigor Is a Must , London: London School of Economics and Political Science.
Cartwright, Nancy D. and Jeremy Hardie, 2012, Evidence-based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chambliss, J.J. (ed.), 1996a, Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia , New York: Garland.
Chambliss, J.J., 1996b, “History of Philosophy of Education”, in Chambliss 1996a, pp. 461–472.
Clayton, Matthew, 2006, Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199268940.001.0001
Cleverley, John and D.C. Phillips, 1986, Visions of Childhood: Influential Models from Locke to Spock , New York: Teachers College Press.
Curren, Randall R., 1998, “Education, Philosophy of”, in E.J. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , vol. 3, pp. 231–240.
–––, 2000, Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
–––, (ed.), 2003, A Companion to the Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470996454
–––, (ed.), 2007, Philosophy of Education: An Anthology , Oxford: Blackwell.
–––, 2013, “A Neo-Aristotelian Account of Education, Justice and the Human Good”, Theory and Research in Education , 11(3): 231–249. doi:10.1177/1477878513498182
–––, 2018, “Education, History of Philosophy of”, revised second version, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online . doi:10.4324/9780415249126-N014-2
Curren, Randall, Emily Robertson, and Paul Hager, 2003, “The Analytical Movement”, in Curren 2003: 176–191. doi:10.1002/9780470996454.ch13
Curren, Randall and Charles Dorn, 2018, Patriotic Education in a Global Age , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dworkin, Ronald, 1977, Taking Rights Seriously , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Elgin, Catherine Z., 1999a, “Epistemology’s Ends, Pedagogy’s Prospects”, Facta Philosophica , 1: 39–54
–––, 1999b, “Education and the Advancement of Understanding”, in David M. Steiner (ed.), Proceedings of the 20 th World Congress of Philosophy , vol. 3, Philosophy Documentation Center, pp. 131–140.
Galston, William A., 1991, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139172462
Gellner, Ernest, 1959, Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology , London: Gollancz.
Gilligan, Carol, 1982, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Goldberg, Sanford, 2013, “Epistemic Dependence in Testimonial Belief, in the Classroom and Beyond”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 47(2): 168–186. doi:10.1111/1467-9752.12019
Goldman, Alvin I., 1999, Knowledge in a Social World , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198238207.001.0001
Greene, Maxine, 1988, The Dialectic of Freedom , New York: Teachers College Press.
Gutmann, Amy and Dennis F. Thompson, 1996, Democracy and Disagreement , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Hand, Michael, 2006, “Against Autonomy as an Educational Aim”, Oxford Review of Education , 32(4): 535–550. doi:10.1080/03054980600884250
Hardie, Charles Dunn, 1941 [1962], Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory , New York: Teachers College Bureau of Publications.
Hirst, Paul, 1965, “Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge”, in Philosophical Analysis and Education , Reginald D. Archambault, (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 113–138.
Hirst, Paul and R.S. Peters, 1970, The Logic of Education , London: Routledge.
Hollis, Martin, 1982, “Education as A Positional Good”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 16(2): 235–244. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9752.1982.tb00615.x
Howe, Kenneth R., 2003, Closing Methodological Divides: Toward Democratic Educational Research , Dordrecht: Kluwer. doi:10.1007/0-306-47984-2
Jacobs, Lesley A., 2010, “Equality, Adequacy, And Stakes Fairness: Retrieving the Equal Opportunities in Education Approach”, Theory and Research in Education , 8(3): 249–268. doi:10.1177/1477878510381627
Kotzee, Ben (ed.), 2013, Education and the Growth of Knowledge: Perspectives from Social and Virtue Epistemology , Oxford: Wiley. doi:10.1002/9781118721254
Kristjánsson, Kristján, 2015, Aristotelian Character Education , London: Routledge.
–––, 2017, “Emotions Targeting Moral Exemplarity: Making Sense of the Logical Geography of Admiration, Emulation and Elevation”, Theory and Research in Education , 15(1): 20–37. doi:10.1177/1477878517695679
Kvernbekk, Tone, 2015, Evidence-based Practice in Education: Functions of Evidence and Causal Presuppositions , London: Routledge.
Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, 2000, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Educational Research , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Locke, J., 1693, Some Thoughts Concerning Education , London: Black Swan in Paternoster Row.
Lucas, Christopher J. (ed.), 1969, What is Philosophy of Education? , London: Macmillan.
Lyotard, J-F., 1984, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1984, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory , second edition, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Martin, Jane Roland, 1985, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Mehta, Ved, 1963, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals , London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Miller, Richard W., 2007, “Unlearning American Patriotism”, Theory and Research in Education , 5(1): 7–21. doi:10.1177/1477878507073602
National Research Council (NRC), 2002, Scientific Research in Education , Washington, DC: National Academies Press. [ NRC 2002 available online ]
Noddings, Nel, 1984, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , Berkeley: University of California Press.
–––, 1992, The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education , New York: Teachers College Press.
–––, 2015, Philosophy of Education , fourth edition, Boulder, CO: Westview.
O’Connor, D.J., 1957, An Introduction to Philosophy of Education , London: Routledge.
Park, J., (ed.), 1965, Bertrand Russell on Education , London: Allen and Unwin.
Peters, R.S., (ed.), 1973, The Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
–––, 1981, Moral Development and Moral Education , London: G. Allen & Unwin.
Phillips, D.C., 1985, “Philosophy of Education”, in International Encyclopedia of Education , Torsten Husén and T. Neville Postlethwaite, (eds.), pp. 3859–3877.
–––, 1987, Philosophy, Science, and Social Inquiry: Contemporary Methodological Controversies in Social Science and Related Applied Fields of Research , Oxford: Pergamon.
–––, 2009, “Empirical Educational Research: Charting Philosophical Disagreements in an Undisciplined Field”, in Siegel 2009: 381–406.
–––, 2010, “What Is Philosophy of Education?”, in Bailey et al. 2010: 3–19. doi:10.4135/9781446200872.n1
–––, (ed.), 2014, Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy , Los Angeles: Sage.
Pritchard, Duncan, 2013, “Epistemic Virtue and the Epistemology of Education”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 47(2): 236–247. doi:10.1111/1467-9752.12022
–––, 2016, “Intellectual Virtue, Extended Cognition, and the Epistemology of Education”, in Baehr 2016: 113–127.
Rawls, John, 1971, A Theory of Justice , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
–––, 1993, Political Liberalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
Robertson, Emily, 2009, “The Epistemic Aims of Education”, in Siegel 2009: 11–34.
Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg (ed.), 1998, Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives , New York: Routledge.
Satz, Debra, 2007, “Equality, Adequacy, and Education for Citizenship”, Ethics , 117(4): 623–648. doi:10.1086/518805
Scheffler, Israel, 1960, The Language of Education , Springfield, IL: Thomas.
–––, 1965, Conditions of Knowledge: An Introduction to Epistemology and Education , Chicago: Scott, Foresman.
–––, 1973 [1989], Reason and Teaching , Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Schouten, Gina, 2012, “Fair Educational Opportunity and the Distribution of Natural Ability: Toward a Prioritarian Principle of Educational Justice”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 46(3): 472–491. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9752.2012.00863.x
Scriven, Michael, 1991a, “Beyond Formative and Summative Evaluation”, in Milbrey McLaughlin and D.C. Phillips (eds.), Evaluation and Education: At Quarter Century , Chicago: University of Chicago Press/NSSE, pp. 19–64.
–––, 1991b, Evaluation Thesaurus , Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Siegel, Harvey, 1988, Educating Reason: Rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education , New York: Routledge.
–––, 1997, Rationality Redeemed?: Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal , New York: Routledge.
–––, 2004, “Epistemology and Education: An Incomplete Guide to the Social-Epistemological Issues”, Episteme , 1(2): 129–137. doi:10.3366/epi.2004.1.2.129
–––, 2005, “Truth, Thinking, Testimony and Trust: Alvin Goldman on Epistemology and Education”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 71(2): 345–366. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00452.x
–––, 2007, “Philosophy of Education”, in Britannica Online Encyclopedia , last modified 2 February 2018. URL = <https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/philosophy-of-education/108550>
–––, (ed.), 2009, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education , New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195312881.001.0001
–––, 2016, “Israel Scheffler”, In J. A Palmer (ed.), Routledge Encyclopaedia of Educational Thinkers , London: Routledge, pp. 428–432.
–––, 2017, Education’s Epistemology: Rationality, Diversity, and Critical Thinking , New York: Oxford University Press.
–––, 2018, “The Epistemology of Education”, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online , doi:10.4324/0123456789-P074-1.
Skinner, B.F., 1948 [1962], Walden Two , New York: Macmillan.
–––, 1972, Beyond Freedom and Dignity , London: Jonathan Cape.
Smeyers, Paulus, 1994, “Philosophy of Education: Western European Perspectives”, in The International Encyclopedia of Education , (Volume 8), Torsten Husén and T. Neville Postlethwaite, (eds.), Oxford: Pergamon, second Edition, pp. 4456–61.
Smith, B. Othanel and Robert H. Ennis (eds.), 1961, Language and Concepts in Education , Chicago: Rand McNally.
Snook, I.A., 1972, Indoctrination and Education , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Stone, Lynda (ed.), 1994, The Education Feminism Reader , New York: Routledge.
Strike, Kenneth A., 2010, Small Schools and Strong Communities: A Third Way of School Reform , New York: Teachers College Press.
Warnick, Bryan R., 2015, “Taming the Conflict over Educational Equality”, Journal of Applied Philosophy , 32(1): 50–66. doi:10.1111/japp.12066
Watson, Lani, 2016, “The Epistemology of Education”, Philosophy Compass , 11(3): 146–159. doi:10.1111/phc3.12316
Winch, Christopher and John Gingell, 1999, Key Concepts in the Philosophy of Education , London: Routledge.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

PES (Philosophy of Education Society, North America)
PESA (Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia)
PESGB (Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain)
INPE (International Network of Philosophers of Education)

Acknowledgments

The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer 2018 update of this entry.

Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

Info about mirror sites

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Cambridge Dictionary +Plus

Meaning of education in English

Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio

I'm very fortunate to have had such a good education.
They had a difference of opinion about their child's education.
It's a disgrace that the government spends so much on guns and so little on education.
Most children in the UK remain in full-time education until they are at least 16 years old .
A college education is often the best route to a good job .
asynchronous
chief academic officer
mainstreaming
miseducation
multi-course
self-instruction
self-instructional
sex education
show/teach someone the ropes idiom

education | Intermediate English

Education | business english, examples of education, collocations with education.

These are words often used in combination with education .

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

Translations of education

Get a quick, free translation!

Word of the Day

play truant

to be regularly absent from school without permission

It’s not really my thing (How to say you don’t like something)

Learn more with +Plus

Recent and Recommended {{#preferredDictionaries}} {{name}} {{/preferredDictionaries}}
Definitions Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English English Learner’s Dictionary Essential British English Essential American English
Grammar and thesaurus Usage explanations of natural written and spoken English Grammar Thesaurus
Pronunciation British and American pronunciations with audio English Pronunciation
English–Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Simplified)–English
English–Chinese (Traditional) Chinese (Traditional)–English
English–Dutch Dutch–English
English–French French–English
English–German German–English
English–Indonesian Indonesian–English
English–Italian Italian–English
English–Japanese Japanese–English
English–Norwegian Norwegian–English
English–Polish Polish–English
English–Portuguese Portuguese–English
English–Spanish Spanish–English
English–Swedish Swedish–English
Dictionary +Plus Word Lists
English Noun
Intermediate Noun
Business Noun
Collocations
Translations
All translations

To add education to a word list please sign up or log in.

Add education to one of your lists below, or create a new one.

Something went wrong.

There was a problem sending your report.

Dictionaries home
American English
Collocations
German-English
Grammar home
Practical English Usage
Learn & Practise Grammar (Beta)
Word Lists home
My Word Lists
Recent additions
Resources home
Text Checker

Definition of education noun from the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary

Want to learn more?

Find out which words work together and produce more natural-sounding English with the Oxford Collocations Dictionary app. Try it for free as part of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary app.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that education is a fundamental human right for everyone and this right was further detailed in the Convention against Discrimination in Education. What exactly does that mean?

Why is education a fundamental human right?

The right to education is a human right and indispensable for the exercise of other human rights.

Quality education aims to ensure the development of a fully-rounded human being.
It is one of the most powerful tools in lifting socially excluded children and adults out of poverty and into society. UNESCO data shows that if all adults completed secondary education, globally the number of poor people could be reduced by more than half.
It narrows the gender gap for girls and women. A UN study showed that each year of schooling reduces the probability of infant mortality by 5 to 10 per cent.
For this human right to work there must be equality of opportunity, universal access, and enforceable and monitored quality standards.

What does the right to education entail?

Primary education that is free, compulsory and universal
Secondary education, including technical and vocational, that is generally available, accessible to all and progressively free
Higher education, accessible to all on the basis of individual capacity and progressively free
Fundamental education for individuals who have not completed education
Professional training opportunities
Equal quality of education through minimum standards
Quality teaching and supplies for teachers
Adequate fellowship system and material condition for teaching staff
Freedom of choice

What is the current situation?

About 258 million children and youth are out of school, according to UIS data for the school year ending in 2018. The total includes 59 million children of primary school age, 62 million of lower secondary school age and 138 million of upper secondary age.

155 countries legally guarantee 9 years or more of compulsory education

Only 99 countries legally guarantee at least 12 years of free education
8.2% of primary school age children does not go to primary school Only six in ten young people will be finishing secondary school in 2030 The youth literacy rate (15-24) is of 91.73%, meaning 102 million youth lack basic literacy skills.

How is the right to education ensured?

The right to education is established by two means - normative international instruments and political commitments by governments. A solid international framework of conventions and treaties exist to protect the right to education and States that sign up to them agree to respect, protect and fulfil this right.

How does UNESCO work to ensure the right to education?

UNESCO develops, monitors and promotes education norms and standards to guarantee the right to education at country level and advance the aims of the Education 2030 Agenda. It works to ensure States' legal obligations are reflected in national legal frameworks and translated into concrete policies.

Monitoring the implementation of the right to education at country level
Supporting States to establish solid national frameworks creating the legal foundation and conditions for sustainable quality education for all
Advocating on the right to education principles and legal obligations through research and studies on key issues
Maintaining global online tools on the right to education
Enhancing capacities, reporting mechanisms and awareness on key challenges
Developing partnerships and networks around key issues

How is the right to education monitored and enforced by UNESCO?

UNESCO's Constitution requires Member States to regularly report on measures to implement standard-setting instruments at country level through regular consultations.
Through collaboration with UN human rights bodies, UNESCO addresses recommendations to countries to improve the situation of the right to education at national level.
Through the dedicated online Observatory , UNESCO takes stock of the implementation of the right to education in 195 States.
Through its interactive Atlas , UNESCO monitors the implementation right to education of girls and women in countries
Based on its monitoring work, UNESCO provides technical assistance and policy advice to Member States that seek to review, develop, improve and reform their legal and policy frameworks.

What happens if States do not fulfil obligations?

International human rights instruments have established a solid normative framework for the right to education. This is not an empty declaration of intent as its provisions are legally binding. All countries in the world have ratified at least one treaty covering certain aspects of the right to education. This means that all States are held to account, through legal mechanisms.
Enforcement of the right to education: At international level, human rights' mechanisms are competent to receive individual complaints and have settled right to education breaches this way.
Justiciability of the right to education: Where their right to education has been violated, citizens must be able to have legal recourse before the law courts or administrative tribunals.

What are the major challenges to ensure the right to education?

Providing free and compulsory education to all
155 countries legally guarantee 9 years or more of compulsory education.
Only 99 countries legally guarantee at least 12 years of free education.
Eliminating inequalities and disparities in education

While only 4% of the poorest youth complete upper secondary school in low-income countries, 36% of the richest do. In lower-middle-income countries, the gap is even wider: while only 14% of the poorest youth complete upper secondary school, 72% of the richest do.

Migration and displacement

According to a 2019 UNHCR report, of the 7.1 million refugee children of school age, 3.7 million - more than half - do not go to school.

Privatization and its impact on the right to education

States need to strike a balance between educational freedom and ensuring everyone receives a quality education.

Financing of education

The Education 2030 Agenda requires States to allocate at least 4-6 per cent of GDP and/or at least 15-20 per cent of public expenditure to education.

Quality imperatives and valuing the teaching profession

Two-thirds of the estimated 617 million children and adolescents who cannot read a simple sentence or manage a basic mathematics calculation are in the classroom.

Say no to discrimination in education! - #RightToEducation campaign

More on this subject

Geneva Human Rights Dialogue on the right to education

HerAtlas: Monitoring the right to education for girls and women HerAtlas: Background, rationale and objectives 12 March 2024

HerAtlas: Monitoring the right to education for girls and women HerAtlas: Disclaimer and terms of use 12 March 2024

Other recent news

UNICEF and UNESCO call for respecting children's right to education in Haiti amidst escalating insecurity and socio-political instability

Level of unprotected teenage sex ‘worryingly high’, WHO finds

Condom use among sexually active adolescents in Europe is on the decline.

Facebook Twitter Print Email

Condom use among sexually active adolescents has declined significantly since 2014, with rates of unprotected sex worryingly high, according to a new report from the World Health Organization ’s Regional Office for Europe.

This is putting young people at greater risk of sexually transmitted infections, unsafe abortions and unplanned pregnancies.

The new data was published as part of the multi-part Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study , which surveyed over 242,000 15-year-olds across 42 countries in Europe, central Asia, and Canada from 2014 to 2022.

‘Pervasive’ decrease in condom use

The UN health agency said the data showed that “ it is clear that the decrease in condom use is pervasive, spanning multiple countries and regions ”.

Overall, the proportion of sexually active adolescents who used a condom at last intercourse fell from 70 per cent to 61 per cent among boys and 63 per cent to 57 per cent among girls between 2014 and 2022.

Moreover, nearly a third of adolescents reported using neither a condom nor the contraceptive pill at last intercourse.

Socioeconomic differences also come into play in the report, with adolescents from low-income families more likely to report not using a condom or the contraceptive pill as last sexual intercourse than those from more affluent families.

Sex education ‘under attack’

One of the reasons for such a shift in unprotected sex is a reluctance in many countries to provide sex education at schools, the WHO maintained.

“Age-appropriate comprehensive sexuality education remains neglected in many countries, and where it is available, it has increasingly come under attack in recent years on the false premise that it encourages sexual behaviour , when the truth is that equipping young persons with the right knowledge at the right time leads to optimal health outcomes linked to responsible behaviour and choices,” remarked Dr Hans Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe.

He highlighted the cascade of negative outcomes as a result of such behaviors, from increased health-care costs to disrupted education and career paths for young people.

“By empowering adolescents to make informed decisions about their sexual health, we ultimately safeguard and improve their overall well-being. This is what all parents and families should want for their children, everywhere,” he concluded.

sexual health

COMMENTS

Education
Education is a wide phenomenon that applies to all age groups and covers formal education (top row) as well as non-formal and informal education (bottom row). Education is the transmission of knowledge, skills, and character traits and manifests in various forms. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as ...
Education
Education is a discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization (e.g., rural development projects and education through parent-child relationships).
EDUCATION Definition & Meaning
Education definition: the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.. See examples of EDUCATION used in a sentence.
What is education? A definition and discussion
A definition and discussion. Education is the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning and change undertaken in the belief that we all should have the chance to share in life. Mark K Smith explores the meaning of education and suggests it is a process of being with others and inviting truth and possibility.
Education Definition & Meaning
The meaning of EDUCATION is the action or process of educating or of being educated; also : a stage of such a process. How to use education in a sentence.
EDUCATION
EDUCATION definition: 1. the process of teaching or learning, especially in a school or college, or the knowledge that…. Learn more.
(PDF) Education : Meaning, definition & Types
The definition of education extends beyond the acquisition of information to include the cultivation of critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving abilities, and ethical decision-making. It ...
education noun
[uncountable, countable] a process of teaching, training and learning, especially in schools, colleges or universities, to improve knowledge and develop skills primary/elementary education; post-secondary education; a college/university education; She completed her formal education in 2019.; Students from lower income families are less likely to continue their education.
Education Definition & Meaning
a [noncount] : the action or process of teaching someone especially in a school, college, or university. The school is devoted to the education of children with reading difficulties. — see also adult education, higher education, physical education. b : the knowledge, skill, and understanding that you get from attending a school, college, or ...
4 Core Purposes of Education, According to Sir Ken Robinson
Personal. Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided.
What is Education? : Meaning, Concept, Aims & Objectives of Education
1.6 How Education Improves the Quality of Life. Education _ is a transformative force that goes beyond the confines of classrooms, enriching lives and elevating societies. Its impact on the quality of life is profound, touching every aspect of an individual's well-being and contributing to the advancement of communities.
What is the Concept, meaning and Characteristics of Education?
Education is a fundamental aspect of human development and plays a crucial role in shaping individuals and societies. It is a lifelong process that involves the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes through various formal and informal means. The concept, meaning, and characteristics of education are multifaceted and have ...
EDUCATION
EDUCATION definition: 1. the process of teaching and learning in a school or college, or the knowledge that you get from…. Learn more.
About education
About education. Education transforms lives and is at the heart of UNESCO's mission to build peace, eradicate poverty and drive sustainable development. UNESCO believes that education is a human right for all throughout life and that access must be matched by quality. UNESCO believes that education is a human right for all throughout life and ...
EDUCATION definition and meaning
5 meanings: 1. the act or process of acquiring knowledge, esp systematically during childhood and adolescence 2. the knowledge.... Click for more definitions.
Philosophy of Education
Philosophy of Education. Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and ...
EDUCATION
EDUCATION meaning: 1. the process of teaching or learning, especially in a school or college, or the knowledge that…. Learn more.
education noun
3 Education [uncountable] the institutions or people involved in teaching and training the Education Department the Board of Education There should be closer links between education and industry.; 4 Education [uncountable] the subject of study that deals with how to teach a College of Education a Bachelor of Education degree She's an education major.; 5 [singular] (often humorous) an ...
BASIC OF EDUCATION: THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF EDUCATION
Education is an essential process in human development. It is different from schooling. Schooling is just one of the ways in which education is provided, whereas education deals with the total ...
Education transforms lives
Education transforms lives and is at the heart of UNESCO's mission to build peace, eradicate poverty and drive sustainable development. It is a human right for all throughout life. The Organization is the only United Nations agency with a mandate to cover all aspects of education. It has been entrusted to lead the Global Education 2030 Agenda ...
Definitions of education
There are various disagreements about whether evaluative and normative aspects should already be included in the definition of education and, if so, what roles they play. [16] [20] An important distinction in this regard is between thin and thick definitions.[16] [21] Thin definitions aim to provide a value-neutral description of what education is, independent of whether and to whom it is useful.
The right to education
The right to education. Every human being has the right to quality education and lifelong learning opportunities. Education is a basic human right that works to raise men and women out of poverty, level inequalities and ensure sustainable development. But worldwide 244 million children and youth are still out of school for social, economic and ...
U.S. Department of Education Releases Framework for 2025-26 FAFSA
The U.S. Department of Education (Department) today released the framework for the testing period it will use starting Oct. 1, 2024, ahead of making the 2025-26 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) available to all students and contributors on or before Dec. 1. The Department's top priority remains ensuring the FAFSA form is stable and delivers a smooth and secure experience ...
The City Beautiful Movement, 1890-1920
Aside from a legacy of still-treasured urban spaces and structures, the City Beautiful movement contributed to a range of urban reforms, from civic education and municipal housekeeping to city planning and regionalism.
What you need to know about the right to education
The right to education is a human right and indispensable for the exercise of other human rights. Quality education aims to ensure the development of a fully-rounded human being. It is one of the most powerful tools in lifting socially excluded children and adults out of poverty and into society. UNESCO data shows that if all adults completed ...
Level of unprotected teenage sex 'worryingly high', WHO finds
The new data was published as part of the multi-part Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study, which surveyed over 242,000 15-year-olds across 42 countries in Europe, central Asia, and Canada from 2014 to 2022. 'Pervasive' decrease in condom use. The UN health agency said the data showed that "it is clear that the decrease in condom use is pervasive, spanning multiple countries and ...

Other Words From

Word History and Origins

Synonym Study

Related Words

More About Education

Where does education come from?

Did you know ... ?

How is education used in real life?

Try using education !

What is education? A definition and discussion

Introduction

Education – cultivating hopeful environments and relationships for learning

Acting in hope

Education – being respectful, informed and wise

Being respectful

Being informed

Education – acting so that all may share in life

Looking beyond process

Having the chance to share in life

Conclusion – so what is education?

The process of education

Further reading and references

Definition of education

Examples of education in a Sentence

Word History

Phrases Containing education

Articles Related to education

9 Slang Words With Academic Origins

Back to School? Time For Some Pedagogy.

Back to School Vocabulary

Dictionary Entries Near education

Cite this Entry

Kids Definition

Can you solve 4 words at once?

Popular in Grammar & Usage

What Is Education For?

Eight Core Competencies

What is Education? : Meaning, Concept, Aims & Objectives of Education

1.1 Concept of Education:

1.2 What is Education?

1.3 Importance of Education.

1.4 Types of Education:

1.4.1 Formal Education:

1.4.2 Informal Education:

1.5 Functions of Education:

1.6 How Education Improves the Quality of Life.

Related Posts

What is the Concept, meaning and Characteristics of Education?

Introduction

Concept of Education :

Meaning of Education :

Nature of Education :

Characteristics of Education:

Bibliography

Philosophy of Education

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

Acknowledgments

Support SEP

Meaning of education in English

education | Intermediate English

Translations of education

Learn more with +Plus

Related items

More on this subject

Other recent news

Level of unprotected teenage sex ‘worryingly high’, WHO finds

‘Pervasive’ decrease in condom use

Sex education ‘under attack’

COMMENTS