Education: Its Meaning and Purpose

Introduction:

This is intended to be a book on Methods of Teaching. It is hoped that it will help the reader understand better what is involved in the process of teaching and how best to go about teaching successfully in a variety of situations. Teaching itself is only part of the process of education. It is therefore necessary that the person who wants to learn to teach should begin by trying-to understand the concept of education itself. To a large extent, what we do to children in school, in the‘ classroom, or even in the home is determined by our view of education. This book therefore begins with a discussion on the meaning and purpose of education, to provide a foundation for the understanding of the methods that will be discussed later.

One-sentence definitions will, as far ‘as possible, be avoided in this book. This is because such definitions do not usually do justice to a con- cept and do not tell the reader all he needs to know about it. So, as far as possible we shall, in the course of most of our discussions, adopt the methods of defining our concepts in as much detail as possible. This means that, for every new concept introduced, we shall give as many of its special characteristics as possible. We will probably not exhaust all the possible characteristics of each concept but we hope that the discussion will help stimulate further thinking on the part of the reader.

TWO broad groups of characteristics of the concept of education will be discussed in this chapter. The first of these will deal with what education is not. It is hoped that a discussion on this category of characteristics will help to clear some of the misconceptions which most people have about education. Our discussion on the second group of characteristics will help to reinforce the non-characteristics and so help-to ensure that the reader ends up with a clear idea of what is really involved in the process of education.