What then is Education?
Education is a social process of change in the behavior of living organisms. This answer, simple as it is, contains several important terms, each of which stands in need of definition. First, education is social, for it involves the participation of different individuals. Secondly, it is a process of change— which suggests something more than a mere change in time or place—for the word process signifies progression in a series of events which are bound to gether, and which pass from a beginning to an end, or perhaps in a circuit which fulfills its destiny by turning full circle upon itself.
The educative process is no arbitrary change, but a systematic and ordered sequence of events. We do not attribute education to a stone which falls from a precipice into a gorge, even though in so doing it should dash itself to pieces on the rocks below; neither do we think of a stream of water as educating the soil over and through which it passes in its turbulent course, even though it does shape and mold its bed by its flow.
Furthermore, the changes wrought by education are changes of behavior. But what do we mean by behavior? A social process is here implied, for the term suggests the manner of conducting oneself, and the treatment one accords to others. Even when used for things instead of persons, as when we speak of the behavior of a machine or of a chemical, it is action directed from within rather than from without which warrants our use of the term.
Thus we seem to feel a human or a personal touch in the behavior of the thing—something like a personal quality, such as demeanor, deportment, or conduct. This brings us to the last term of our definition: living organisms. Personality belongs to living organisms, and it is with these that we are concerned in education. Furthermore, we are concerned with organisms, not merely as they live and grow, but as they behave and conduct themselves in accordance with the conditions of living and growing.
Thus the “process of change” which is a proper subject for physics and mathematics, is, in the specific instance of education, a change of behavior made in a living organism which not only lives but feels, and perhaps reflects. It thus appears that our simple definition is not simple after all; for it leads us into four great fields of science— Physics, Biology, Psychology, and Sociology—and into Philosophy. Many of our data and much of our method must be borrowed from these sources.
But it will be best to state our problem concretely, and borrow as our needs are felt, rather than try to survey the relevant sciences and present a philosophy of life at the outset of our inquiry. Everyone knows that physics deals with mass and motion; and that a child or an adult man has both. Everyone knows, too, that the subject of education is a living creature having biological, psychological, and sociological aspects. With this knowledge we can let the creature tell its own story by its concrete behavior, without trying to trace each aspect of this behavior back to its scientific or philosophical source. .
Beginning, then, with the quaintly inadequate little creature who comes into the world untaught and uninformed, what can we make of a baby’s first days of life? Aimless as his movements appear to be, and dependent as he is upon the guiding care of mother and nurse, a closer scrutiny reveals certain ways that are original to himself. His eyes will blink; and though they sometimes wander in different directions, they will converge and “fixate” a bright point of light shown in a darkened room. More over, when his hands come in contact with a seizable object, his fingers will grip it so rigidly that he can thereby be raised from the ground and suspended in the air for some time.
Read More : The Problem of Education
