What is education? Is it different from schooling?

In this
piece Mark K Smith explores the meaning of education and
suggests it is a process of inviting truth and possibility.
It can be defined as the wise, hopeful and respectful
cultivation of learning undertaken in the belief that all
should have the chance to share in life.
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
 

A definition for starters: Education is the wise, hopeful and

respectful cultivation of learning undertaken in the belief that all
should have the chance to share in life.

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 act with people rather on them.
Their task is to educe (related to the Greek notion of educere), to bring out or
develop potential. Such education is:
 Deliberate and hopeful. It is learning we set out to make happen in the
belief that people 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 people to live their lives as
well as they 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 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 people.
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).

Intention
Education is deliberate. We act with a purpose – to develop 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. Often, though, we seek to encourage learning in others. 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 normally 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).

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