There are some who say the principles behind contemporary education are all wrong. I recently commented to a colleague that our question is how to educate students in a way that is appropriate to them. The colleague, though a visionary in his own right, retorted that the perception that we as teachers educate students is what is at the core of this all-pervasive wrongness. Yet the etymology of the word “educate” shows that in fact he and I agree. The wrongness is, in fact, in the warping of the word’s meaning.
As any Latin class survivor can (hopefully) confirm, the word educate is composed of the root “ducare”, meaning to lead, and the prefix “ex”, meaning out. Education, therefore, is the process of leading learners out, guiding them to explore from the strength of the storehouse that is already within them.
Seen this way, my remark paraphrases as “how do we lead students’ existing awareness out to build on it, in a way that matches their individual needs?” I do, in fact, maintain that this is one of the core questions every (good) teacher faces every day. Education is not about where the knowledge is, or where we as teachers stand, but about creating a passable route between learner and knowledge. Thus follows, as night the day, that the route needs to begin at the learner – not the knowledge or the teacher.
Though this view of education sounds simple and perhaps even simplistic, it embraces the core of time-tested as well as contemporary pedagogy. Although other aspects of the equation cannot be disregarded, if the learner is where we want results, the learner is the place to begin.
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