What Do We Mean By Education?

In a comment (below) Ellie said...

"But what do you do when your sutdents are minors and your questions conflict with a parent's right to teach a child *their* prefered wordview? Do you as a teacher still have an assumed right to ask your qustions and parental rights be dammed our do parental rights trump yours and put you under obligation to shut your mouth? Is your classroom under an obligation to answer to the parent and you as it's teacher obligated to a form a self control you may not internally agree with because a parent's rights to preference of worldview matter more than your right to speach?"

My first response to this is to note that the thinker perhaps most responsible for academic thought - Socrates - was executed for corrupting the morals of Athenian youth.

To put this another way (and rephrasing my initial post): Education necessarily (as I see it) is based on and driven by the process of asking questions. Education is what happens after a question is asked. I once heard that in certain Eastern traditions, a teacher does not begin instruction until the student requests it - meaning, in part, that instruction cannot begin until the student knows that she wants to learn, and knows how to ask to learn.

Which gets at an operating definition of education, which I think is grossly misunderstood and misrepresented in our society. We seem to think that education involves the IMPARTING OF FACTS - as though the young mind were an empty vessel, and the teacher's job to fill that vessel with the fruits of truth and wisdom. But my experience has been - and my belief remeains - that education involves the STIMULATION OF THOUGHT - that is, catalyzing the young mind to engage her environment critically, tactically, and reflectively in order to develop as a human being (and a citizen).

In the case where students are minors and parents wish to assert that their world view must be the view that is taught to their children, the root of the problem is not what is being taught, but what the very definition of TEACHING is. Parents who don't want their children in the habit of asking annoying questions are probably not interested in having their children genuinely educated (according to my definition of education, anyway). So the debate is really not over what gets taught in the classroom (i.e. we're debating the wrong issues in public discourse on education today). The debate really resides in a fundamental conflict over what a classroom is, ought to be, and should be doing.

My answer to your question would be to suggest that no, it is not your obligation to teach someone else's world view, any more than it is your right to teach your own. What a teacher, in my view, should first and foremost concentrate on teaching is helping a student realize the extent to which they are capable of (and responsible for) constructing and informing their own view of the world. (And for some, this process of empowerment is an inherently radical act. I see it as a basic act of human respect.)