What is this phenomenon? As I reflect on my life and what my answers, at various times, were, I find myself in a deep quandary. I try to name one thing, or even three things that education is and then I always feel that my answer(s) amputate part of this marvelous phenomenon that has meant so much to me throughout my life; nevertheless, I am going to attempt, through the writing of this essay, to discover what it is.
When I was six years old, and starting first grade, I was surely daunted, indeed intimidated by what “education” meant for my life. At that time, as I thought of it, if was the lengthy process by which I would prepare for independence in adulthood. I knew that I would have to learn to count, do mathematics, and read so that I could earn a living when I grew up. I knew that I would be in school for what seemed to be an eternity, and the conception I had of what I was doing in school was like the feeling of an early morning trip along a foggy mountain road: undefined and permeatinig beyond visibility. I was to please my teachers by acquiring vocabulary, completing operations of logic and of comprehension. On the concrete level, I was to enrich my understanding of the ABCs by memorizing letter sounds and rules for spelling and prnounciation, and learn to count to 100.
I did not know to differentiate between the logic of counting and the memorization required to read, spell, and write. Reciting the alphabet and the numbers up to 100 seemed to be the same sort of task, except there were almost 4 times as many units to remember when it came to the numbers up to 100. Talk about daunting, I could not memorize the numbers and when called on to count in front of the class, I was caught off guard, peed myself, and humiliated in front of the whole class. It was some merciful fellow pupil who subsequently showed me the logic of the base ten system, and fixed my problem. And thus, I was able to clear a major educational hurdle, and henceforward I would enjoy the discovery of certain educational keys that unlocked new levels of understanding.
I had a similar experience with the elements of reading, In my kindergarten years I was introduced to reading whole words since my mother labeled items around my room such as “bed”, “chair” and so forth. In first grade when I was introduced to phonics, I assumed that my sight word method of reading was wrong, and I suddenly became a very slow reader, sounding out every letter in every word, and attempting to blend those sounds together to make words. Still, I loved stories, particularly greek and Roman mythology, and I would check out books from the library and get my parents to read them to me so I coulld give the required book reports to the class.
This slow readiing persisted into third grade for me, when I recall my mother remarking, “It seems to me like at some point I learned to recognize a lot of words that I knew, and I didn’t have to sound them out anymore.” And then sometime between third and fourth grade, some adult helped me discover The Borrowers, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and A Wrinkle in Time. Some magic happened, and I didn’t have to sound out every word anymore (but I knew how to sound them out when I needed to). That magic seemed to be at least in part what was meant by the term “education”. But there seems to be far more implied when I use that term, “education”.
Once the child is able to read, write, spell, and do arithmetic, those skills seem to become infinitely more complicated as new, more complex or abstract vocabulary is introduced and things are analyzed into ever smaller and smaller units, which are then named. The subjects of groups, sets, communities, towns, professions, microscopes, binoculars, and telescopes are introduced, and social studies and science emerge. These latter tools permit human beings to name ever smaller and ever larger things, and the records of how human beings came to name these ever smaller and larger phenomena becomes the studies of linguistics, languages, and history; and, as humans turn their instruments onto themselves, the social, and biological sciences emerge and broaden.
Is this education? I will hazard to say that it is not in itself education, but it is a part of it. As I was watching a series of videos on the art and archetectural history by Jacob Bronowski, in my high school physical science class, I recall one day when I surprised myself by no longer being intimidated by physical science. That day, I thought to myself that all education on anysubject seemed to be was naming things, and defining them.
But my confidence was soon shattered when I found out in geometry and biology class that knowledge doesn’t simply come from knowint the names of things, but also from knowing how these things interact with each other, and learning how to follow algorithms to derive answers to questions about how things act upon each other to change each other. Geometry proofs eluded me, and genetics challenged my common sense to the point that I barely passed one course, and failed the other.
Nevertheless, I was able to pass the requirements to graduate by studying birds. And then I went on to higher education, or college as they call it. It seems that I went to college for two reasons: one, to demonstrate that I could manage to delay gratification for 4 years, and secondly, to take all that vocabulary and all those algotrithms about how things interact , and see, in a deep way — indeed, comprehend — that everything was a part of one great whole.
And then after a year serving as an intern teacher in my former grade school, I went to graduate school in special education. And there, to qualify for graduate level courses I had to take the undergrad course: The Philosophy and Foundations of American Education — from which I remember nothing. I suppose it all boils down to an argument between the conservatives who see the lives of mankind without rules, laws and civilization as cruel, brutal, nasty, and short, and the liberals who believe that mankind in its “natural state” is generous, kind, and loving, and that it is civilization itself that has corrupted us to the poiint at which we we rob from, cheat on, and steal from each other.
So, now, at my ripe old age, what do I believe education is? I dare not venture a definition, knowing as I do, that my point of view is just that. A point of view, A very small point indeed. But I can say this: My education has led me to a point of humility that prevents me from having the ambition to dominate and control others. And yet, I am a teacher, and I demand that my students sit and pay attention to me when I am working. I believe in my heart of hearts that I am insisting on a behavior that will lead to their becoming better educated in the future. Discipline in the early stages leads to freedom to explore in the later years. I believe Picasso illustrated this process through his art. If you look at his early works, he worked very hard to represent models and still-lifes as realistically as he could. It was only after he felt he had mastered the photographic realism that he branched out into cubism.