Edu-Wit #2 - What is Education?

MONARCH believes that education and schooling are both important but they are not the same thing. We begin with education:

“The purposeful, conscious effort to transmit ideas, knowledge, skills, habits, values, opinions, expectations and standards through instruction, study, example and experience.”

Diane Ravitch, 1990

“Education – the interactive teaching/learning process- may be carried on in formal institutions such as schools and universities, or in informal settings such as families, camps, business seminars and book clubs, etc.“

Adrian Guldemond, 2010

“The great end of education is to discipline rather than furnish the mind; to train it to use its ow powers, rather than to fill it with the accumulation of others.”

Tyron Edwards

“To raise clever doubts, to prefer searching to finding, and perpetually to pose problems without ever solving them are the great enemies of education.”

Jacques Maritain, 1940

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”

Barbara Tuchman, 1970

“The test and use of man’s education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.”

Jacques Barzun, 1960

“The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge, but to increase the possibilities for a child to invent and discover.”

Jean Piaget

“The end and aim of all education is the development of character.”

Francis W. Parker, 1890

“Education is the systematic, purposeful reconstruction of experience.”

John Dewey, 1920

“I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully and magnanimously all the offices, private and public, of peace and war.”

John Milton, 1650

“Cultivation of the mind is as necessary as food for the body”

Cicero

“Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

Joseph Stalin, 1934