2 1.2 THE CONCEPT OF EDUCATION

Education is “the process of cultural transmission and renewal,” the process whereby the adult members of a society carefully guide the development of infants and young children, initiating them into the culture of the society. For infants and young children, education often takes the form of indoctrination, that is, the process of compelling the child to ‘eat’ or ‘play’ or do his/ her homework at particular times of the day. In the training or upbringing of children, a measure of freedom is allowed so that they can have the opportunity of learning at their own rate and behaving in their own particular ways, provided their learning processes and general behaviour do not present a wide departure from the accepted social standards and convenlions of their society. Freedom is therefore a relative term and the extent of freedom a person enjoys depends largely on the culture of the society to which he or she belongs and the values which that society upholds. Hence, what society “A” values as freedom may be condemned as an act of indiscipline by society “B”. For example, the kind of freedom which some parents in the Western world allow their children and wards,’ such as calling elders by their names, is seriously condemned in African traditional society (Adeyemi, 2001).

The word education is derived from two Latin words.

• The first one is educate (educo, educare, educavi, educatum), a first conjugation verb, meaning “to bring up,” “to rear,” “to guide,” “to direct,” “to educate” . From this Latin origin, we infer that education is the process of bringing up children by adult members of the family and the society, a process of rearing children, a process of guiding, directing and educating children. However, the process of bringing up, rearing, guiding, directing and educating is not limited to children. Adolescents in post-primary educational institutions and adults in post-secondary institutions (such as students in universities) also need guidance and directing. Further, the tasks of “bringing up,” “rearing,” “guiding,” “directing,” and “educating” are more than the school alone can offer. All adult members of the society are concerned with all these tasks and in that way complement the efforts of the school. From this clarification, we infer that education is bigger than schooling because education takes place within and outside the school. Indeed, schooling can get in the way or disrupt a person’s education, as in the epigram of Sir George Bernard Shaw, the Irish dramatist and critic, who once declared that “schooling had interrupted his education.”‘
• The second Latin word from which education derived is educere (educo, educere, eduxi, eductum), a third conjugation verb, meaning “to draw out,” “to lead out,” “to raise up,” “to bring up,” or “rear a child”. From this latter derivative, a more comprehensive definition of education emerges: education becomes the slow and skilful process of extracting the latent potentialities of comprehension and dedication, in contradistinction with indoctrination, which simply means “the implanting of a ready-made set of unexamined concepts in the child’s mind.” In other words, education appears to be the exact opposite of indoctrination, for, while the concept of education embraces the idea of freedom of selection, the concept of indoctrination excludes the idea of freedom and lays emphasis on an unquestioned acceptance of a ready-made set of dogmas, for example, the political dogmas in a totalitarian state or the religious doctrines of some Christian Churches or Muslim societies.

As in the case of educate, the tasks implicit or explicit in the meaning of educere are more than schools alone can give. All members of the family, the peer-group, the age-grade organization, community leaders, the church, the mosque, the shrine or other place of worship, the school and the mass media have their distinctive roles to play. In summing up the above, we can define education as:

1. The process of nourishing or rearing; the process of bringing up (young persons); the manner in which a person has been brought up.
2. The systematic instruction, schooling or rearing given to the young (and, by implication, to adults) in preparation for the work of life. Also the whole course of scholastic instruction which a person has received (Little et al., 1968, p. 584).

Therefore, we see that education could refer to both the process of training and the product or result of training. A society embracing an alien culture would therefore normally be expected to adopt the process of education introduced by the alien group and the use that should be made of the beneficiaries or products of that education. Apart from our interpretation of the ideas implicit and explicit in the Latin origins given above, there are some other definitions of education which may be of interest in the context of our discussion.