A starting point

In the last post I think I provided a lot of personal information, without an overabundance of structure or even hints as to what exactly I will be writing about. Obviously epicenter of the .


Education is a vague topic. Define education right now. I'll give you eight seconds. Time's up. What did you come up with? If you didn't cheat by googling (yes that is a word now) it you may have found yourself struggling to find the right words. If you simply thought, "Education = school" you aren't necessarily wrong, but you certainly right in the purest sense either. Wikipedia (I really don't give a rip if you think Wikipedia is the end of scholarly research so you can save your opinion) defines education as "any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to another."


When you read the first part of that definition it very well may have not made a lot of sense to you. This is perfectly fine, it didn't click immediately with me either (may or may not have something to do with how dehydrated I am right now, nothing a little H²O can't fix). In the first definition, they're saying that anything you could possibly learn or experience via any vehicle at all is considered education. A familiar example would be a young child being hit by a car because he was standing in the street. If said child has any working brain cells, and assuming he survives the hit-and-run, he will have learned that standing in the street hurts. This will predictably shape his decisions in the future, when, say, he's crossing the street. The second part of the definition should be familiar to all of us so I don't have to come up with an example that walks the line between horrifying and funny.


Throughout the year I am hoping to cover a few specific areas within education: the student, the teacher, the roles of each of the former, and government's effect on education. I am in no way limited to the specific discussions listed. I have lots of different tidbits to talk about, but listing them all would be tiresome for me and boring for you to read. Boom. Roasted.