Definition of Education

The definition of education guiding mainstream schools today is that education is the delivery of knowledge, skills, and information from teachers to students. While the above metaphor—education as a delivery system—sounds reasonable, it misses what is most important about education.

This mistaken idea of what true education is and how it can be achieved is the root problem in mainstream education today.

This conception of education contributes to harming students and teachers by driving policy makers to insist on accounting for the "units" of information that students demonstrate knowledge of on tests.

The perceived need for mass scale standardized outcomes leads to a kind of instructional bookkeeping that drives administrators to control teachers' behavior, which in turn is directed to controlling students' behavior in ways that increases symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other forms of diminished psychological well-being.

Student outcomes as measured by tests bear little relationship to true education, and so the instructional bookkeeping scheme is a failure even before the harm it causes is taken into consideration.

For many people the importance of education lies in future job prospects, for others it's quality of citizenship, and yet others just want literacy, critical thinking, and/or creativity.

Units are only useful to the degree that they ultimately serve the goals of the learner getting from one state of mind to another.

The delivery metaphor as it's used in the dominant definition of education is one of those illusions that we need to overcome in order to relieve suffering in the world, in this case the suffering of children and teachers and probably all the other people in schools, too.

Using that metaphor in our definition of education seemed like a good idea for a while until we discovered the unintended side effect of suffering that it causes.

Now we know better and can take action to do better.