What is Education? Part Three

A good contrast

One effective way to understand the true nature of a thing is to contrast the thing with what it is not. In the case of education, several often-used means of social control masquerade as education. Let's take a look at two of the fakes!

What education is not

A great deal of what is labeled education might better be labeled as “imparting propaganda” or brainwashing. 

Propagandizing is presenting only one side of a controversial issue, using persuasion and the threat of force to insure that the student is convinced that the side he or she learned about is the correct side. 

This is a leading question!

Brainwashing involves the use of emotional, physical, or spiritual forces to mold a student’s mind into a closed, distorted view of an issue.

Both propagandizing and brainwashing are the exact opposite of education. Far from starting with cooperation between student and educator, they start with an unequal relationship in which the student is below, and the educator is above. 

There is no respect given to the previous contents of the student’s intellect—in fact, these contents are often ridiculed and vilified as old-fashioned, bourgeois, or evil. The student is not encouraged to pull out what he or she already knows, but is instead bombarded with new ideas and attitudes in a non-stop stream, making it impossible for him or her to evaluate, compare, and either accept or reject the new premises.

Too often, the student either collapses under the weight of a strongly-expressed one-sided view or closes their mind altogether in self-defense. In this scenario, the student may successfully regurgitate the new information to please or escape from the propagandists, but internally refuse to accept it into his or her conscious mind. However, the unconscious mind may store some of this information, causing confusion and cognitive dissonance for the student later in life.

Necessities for true education to happen

The elements needed for real education are not what one might expect. 

Obedience, diligence, and determination are often cited as key ingredients in a successful student, especially in conservative educational circles. However, as seen above, these qualities are not crucial and may even be detrimental.

Tradition

The elements that true education needs are these:

1. Respect between student and teacher, based on shared values and ethics.
2. Willingness on both parts to be proven wrong (humility).
3. Acceptance of the certainty that no humanly-held  knowledge is perfect or all-encompassing, as the intellect filters and distorts, due to its woeful limitations,  what the world is really like.

Obedience, diligence and determination are admirable qualities only when turned to good use; when used for political or military purposes, as history makes clear, they can produce dictators and killing machines when steered in destructive directions. 

More useful in education is the open, inquiring mind, grounded by the virtues of fairness, decency and appreciation of the diversity of the world, that seeks to compare what it already knows to what can be apprehended through guided observations.

Educators are well-advised to keep in mind that they are not imparters of stone-set truths; rather they are  facilitators who accompany students on the journey of education. Students are well-advised to insist that they be allowed to pull out and examine what they already know, believe, and live by, and then compare these values and beliefs to new or different information and ideas, rather than blindly accepting what’s being told to them.

Education works best in relationships of trust, with an egalitarian underpinning, where opinions and insights are freely expressed and debated. A good teacher is both an encourager and a challenger to the student, drawing out both hidden gems of wisdom and intellectual discrepancies to be examined, evaluated, and either accepted as is or modified to better fit reality.

I  thoroughly enjoy the educational process, both as teacher and (more rarely, and thus more preciously) as student. “Drawing out that which lies within” has artistic, medical and spiritual undertones, implying creation, healing and fulfillment; this is education at its best.