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Can 'Education' Be Defined?
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10542 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
2,753 Words |
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T.S. Eliot
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Education is a subject on which we all feel that we have something to say. We have all been educated, more or less; and we have, most of us, complaints to make about the defects of our own education; and we all like to blame our educators, or the system within which they were compelled to work, for our failure to educates ourselves...
...It is immediately obvious that the word education means something different, to begin with, when we are talking of what is offered and when we are talking of what is received; when we are talking of education as something done to people and when we when mean what they do for themselves. We may mean the machine, or we may mean the contact of an apt pupil with the right teacher...
...But besides the variations of meaning of the same word in the same place at different times, and at the same time in different places, there is the still more important variation of meaning of the same word at the same time in the same place. Before proceeding farther, I want to suggest that this wobbliness of words is not something to be deplored. We should not try to pin a word down to one meaning, which it should have at all times, in all places, and for everybody. Of course there must be many words in a language which are relatively at least fixed always to one meaning. To say nothing of scientific terms, there are many substantives which name concrete objects and must have meant essentially the same thing throughout the history of the language.
...But there are also many words which must change their meaning, because it is their changes in meaning that keep a language alive, or rather, that indicate that the language is alive. If they did not change, it would mean either that we were living exactly the same life as our ancestors (the rate of change in the meaning of words in the language of a primitive tribe I should expect, other things being equal, to be very slow) or else that our language was no longer adequate to our needs in which case, the more progressive language of some neighbor might supplant it.
Related to the change of meaning of words from one generation to another, are the variations of meaning which they may come to have at the same time, and it is these variations with which I am here concerned…
The word I am after, of course, is education. Is the book in which I indiscreetly committed myself to a chapter of notes on education [Notes Towards the Definition of Culture], I made... some efforts to
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