Education

(L. educatio, the act of developing the physical, intellectual and moral faculties). System for transmitting and extending knowledge, skills and norms of conduct and social communication that includes corresponding theories (pedagogical science) and educational institutions. It is divided into pr-school, elementary, intermediate, technical school, university, adult and special e. (for the deaf, blind, etc.), distance e., self study and other branches. There are differences between state, municipal private e., and e. programs offered by associations. E. is the individual’s preparation for culture, for work, for the practice of science, ethics, art, etc. Because it contributes to the formation of each person’s ideology, culture, morality and orientation toward life and work, e. is the most important and traditional source of socialization. It is customary to speak of e. in at least two different senses. One refers to the transmission of information and knowledge from educator to student, and here the new information technologies tend to progressively replace the educator’s work. There is another sense in which e. is conceived as a preparation, a training of the student for the world they live in. This “world” refers as much to intangibles such as values and human relations, as it does to physical things. In this second sense, e. seeks to enable different modes of comprehension, points of view, different perspectives for understanding the realities of material and cultural objects as well as those of one’s interiorize. An e. that is increasingly limited to the transmission of object-al data, is an important factor of the “emptying out” of the subjectivity and meaning in human actions. This type of e. demands profound reforms. Clearly, the problem of e. is one of the most pressing in the contemporary world. Massive e. through the use of the new electronic technologies opens up a vast field of possibilities for the development of collective knowledge. It should be noted, however, that the dissemination of knowledge (however neutral or scientific it claims to be), carries with it the dominant ideology, this being most clearly observable in the field of the human sciences (philosophy, history, psychology, sociology, law, economics, etc.). Moreover, this has happened and happens, whatever the method of e., independently of the technology it uses. In Humanize the Earth Silo writes: 1. … to educate is basically to train new generations in the exercise of a non-naive vision of reality, so that their look takes in a world not as a supposedly objective reality in itself, but rather as the object of transformation to which human beings apply their action. But I am not speaking now of information about the world; I am speaking, rather, of the intellectual exercise of a particular UN-prejudiced vision toward landscapes and of an attentive practice toward one’s own look. A basic education should strive for the exercise of coherent thought. This does not, in this case, refer to knowledge per Se, but to the person’s contact with their own registers of thinking. 2. Second, education should make use of the incentive of emotional comprehension and development; thus, the exercise of dramatics on the one hand and self-expression on the other, in addition to expertise in managing harmony and rhythm, should be considered in planning an integral education. But the object of such an education is not to instrument procedures that seek to produce artistic talents, the intention is rather that individuals make emotional contact with themselves and others, without the alterations and disorientation that are induced by an education of separateness and inhibition. 3. Third, education should involve a practice that will call into harmonic play all of the person’s corporal resources, and this discipline more closely resembles a form of gymnastics performed artfully than it does a sport, which does not form the person integrally, but in a one-sided fashion. What is entailed here is to allow the person to make contact with their body and to govern it with ease and assurance. Thus, although sports would not have to be regarded as formative activity, their practice would be useful were it based on above-mentioned discipline. 4. Thus far I have spoken of education from the point of view of activities formative of human beings in their human landscape, without speaking of information as it relates to knowledge, to the incorporation of data through study and through practice as a form of study.