Everyday we hear about “we are in a knowledge society “it is because of nowadays people are more informed. The information is everywhere, It is on the television, radio, internet, newspapers, it allows to the person to be aware of all events that happen in the world. When we talk about knowledge we also talk about education, a lot of books have defined Education as “any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another”.
This concept about education says us that education is a reciprocal process, the person receives the information through an instructor in order to acquire knowledge, and from this definition I can assume that the purpose of education is to develop the knowledge, Skills or the character of the learners. If we want to understand about education we need to understand first of all about knowledge and how it arises in the mind of a person when interact with an idea or experience.
The first thing that interests me about education is knowledge gain. Education gives us the knowledge of the world around us. It develops in us a perspective of looking a better life. It helps us to build opinions and have points of view on everything in life. Education makes us able to interpret rightly the things perceived. Many authors have written about education and they have given great contributions, some of them are:
“The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.” ~Eric Hoffer
“No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.” ~Emma Goldman
“The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.” ~Ayn Rand
"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think—rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.” ~Bill Beattie
"The one real object of education is to leave a man in the condition of continually asking questions.” ~Bishop Creighton“The central job of schools is to maximize the capacity of each student.” ~Carol Ann Tomlinson
"The one real object of education is to leave a man in the condition of continually asking questions.” ~Bishop Creighton“The central job of schools is to maximize the capacity of each student.” ~Carol Ann Tomlinson
I reviewed all these quotations to demonstrate the diversity of beliefs about the purpose of education. Some authors focused on knowledge, some on the teacher,and others on the student. It is so difficult to find an only definition of education that is agreed by all. The meanings they have to the word are complex beliefs arising from their own values and experiences. As a teachers when we have a contact with the real education we can have a detail idea about what we want to achieve, we usually write a lesson plan with some objectives, we also have our syllabus and maybe we have clear about competences and the way that we will teach, however we have not a clear idea about education purpose.
John Dewey made the point that we are not able to plug directly into another person's brain. ”We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment”. He continued, “Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference”. The physical environment - the shape of the room, the way chairs are laid out, lighting and heating will influence the way we feel and think about the activities we are engaged in. In turn, our social relationships will affect the way we view these things.
Teachers have different connotations about education. Whether it takes place in the classroom, it must be include certain values. Like: Respect for persons, the promotion of well-being, sincerity, equality. These values include the content of education, taking in account the importance of the behavior and relationships of the learners. Julius Nyerere once summed these concerns up when he talked of the purpose of education as being the liberation of humans from the restraints and limitations of ignorance and dependency. “Nothing else can be properly called education. Teaching which induces a slave mentality or a sense of impotence is not education at all - it is an attack on the minds of men”.
Every author in the education history talk about the importance of education I see this importance in the way of how The education make us see and do the right things and how it influences in our behavior, the goods manners that make us civilized people .Education is the basis of the culture and civilization it is relevant in the development of our values and thoughts. Education becomes us in mature individuals, individuals able to plane the future and take rights decisions.
Education open doors a great opportunities to be better each day, every employer of today require a well educated personal for this reason we need to be competent and to improve our knowledge every day.Institutions offer frameworks of education, we have primary education, secondary education, superior education and many others studies after that, we can specialize in fields of our interest, but education does end there, it is a lifelong process. The process must continue because it is the only way to progress in life and to develop new thoughts that can helps us to be productive each day. Educate is the only way to grow and to have better opportunities but it is not the obligation of the teacher, he is just an instructor the decision is in learner who decide when to learn what and how to use this knowledge for his own life.
