Education

noun. The systematic instruction, schooling, or training given to the young in preparation for the work of life

History:

The Oxford English Dictionary cites Sir Thomas Elyot's 1531 The Book Named the Governor as the earliest instance of education in English. Elyot's work is an instruction manual on education, and it advocates reading classical writers and developing a well-grounded moral philosophy. Another definition, "the process of nourishing or rearing a child or young person," eventually evolved into the idea of "systematic instruction." By the mid-nineteenth century, education was understood as "culture or development of powers, formation of character, as contrasted with imparting of mere knowledge." With this understanding, Henry Manning wrote, "Education is the formation of the whole man—intellect . . . character, mind, and soul." However, his contemporary, Horace Mann, shifted the focus toward public education. Mann declared it vital for the life of the republic when delivered by trained professionals who valued a high, though nonsectarian, morality. Today, Merriam-Webster Online focuses on education as solely the province of schools, colleges, and universities.

Etymology:

The Latin prefix ex- ("out"), the Latin base ducere ("to lead"), and the verbal suffix -ate, yield the etymological definition, "leading out." Some etymologists suggest that the combination of ex- and ducere yielded two verbs: educere, "bring out, lead forth," and educare, "bring up, rear." Some assert that educere generally refers to physical nurture, while educare refers to nurturing the mind. In either case, the Latin noun educationem, "a rearing, training," entered Middle English as educaten.

Effect:

Since its first appearance, education has held a sense of nurturing body, mind, and spirit. Naturally, such a connotation supports the idea that parents begin the education of a child. Indeed, Proverbs 22:6 advises, "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it" (ESV). Parents are charged to educate their children. As they rear children, they provide food, clothing, and shelter. Additionally, Christian parents model and instill the values of work, love, and faith.

However, John Dewey's 1897 "Pedagogic Creed" removes parents from having any role in education. As Senator Ben Sasse writes in The Vanishing American Adult, "Dewey wanted everything in the school focused on how it can be instrumentally put to the cause of evolving Hegelian 'social progress.'" Sasse goes on to observe that the atheist Dewey (who curiously insisted on continuing to use the word God in an exclusively secular sense) developed a kind of theology, asserting, "I believe . . . the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God." Dewey is called the father of modern public education. Of course, his is a statist vision of the kingdom of God, redirected away from parents and Judeo-Christianity.

Merriam-Webster's third entry under educate offers this definition: "to persuade or condition to feel, believe, or act in a desired way." The key words here are "condition" and "feel." Schools that have moved toward favoring feelings over thoughts have also moved away from nurturing toward conditioning. While classical education seeks to transmit cultural knowledge and to teach the process of thinking objectively in all realms, contemporary education seeks to encourage following feelings, as Jean-Jacques ­Rousseau would have it, so long—of course—as those feelings conform to the ideology of the ones making decisions about education. God gave children to parents, and parents will always love their children more than the state does. Dewey instrumentalized the state to usurp parents' God-given authority. Parents who love their children are right to exert their authority under God over state conditioners.