What is education?

I used to ask my career college students to define an educated person. (To read some of their answers, see “Defining an educated person,” my posting for May 5). I wasn’t looking for a formal definition of “educated,” and I had no answer in mind when I asked the question. But if I want to put higher education in its place, I need to be clear about what I think education is and what I think it ought to do.

So here is a formal definition: Education is a field of human endeavor concerned with the acquisition of cognitive skills necessary for independent intellectual and moral (behavioral) functioning. Educating children develops emotional and physical skills as well, but in general, higher education assumes that students have already gone through those developmental stages.

Because education is a cultural endeavor, it will also give students a framework within which to understand nature and human interaction. This means that when I teach a child to add and subtract, I do it in part by referring to the mercantile system in which that child will ultimately need to use arithmetic. When I teach the scientific method as a skill for dealing with the natural world, I assume at the same time that the natural world operates according to scientific principles.

It might be possible to limit education to only those principles that have no cultural implications, but it would not be very useful. Furthermore, teaching that gives students no skills for dealing constructively with the world outside their own culture (such as the teaching we hear of Afghan boys receiving in madrassas) does not fit my definition of education.

Ideally, education exposes students to a variety of ideas without telling them what to think. Education is concerned with the mechanics of thinking about ideas, with questioning, comparing, and using trial and error to arrive at solutions. In Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning, knowledge—recall of data or information—is just the beginning level. Beyond mere knowledge lie comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and finally, evaluation.

The idea that acquiring knowledge equates to getting educated reflects the consumerist bias of American culture. The consequence of this idea is we have a lot of people running around with college degrees who are not really educated at all.