I like the contrast between education and schooling in this article. I often talk about it in terms of education and knowledge. When I do, I speak of education as training for a career and knowledge as training for life. They are certainly not identical
One of my favorite writers in the field of education, Alfie Kohn, asks a very important question in the title of one of his books, What Does It Mean To Be Well-Educated? George Eliot makes a claim that seems to take up this question by stating, “It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught…to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small, hungry, shivering self” (Middlemarch).
There is inherent in these two ideas this common thread: being well-educated should liberate persons from their small, hungry, shivering selves. Indeed, the intent of education should be about this very thing, so that the answer to Kohn’s question should be: being well-educated is the liberated self, enlarged by generosity, fed by virtue, and warmed by the well-being of one’s fully formed self.
Though this is what education should be (and…
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