What is Education?

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by: marthajensen
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Word Count: 458
Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2010 Time: 6:50 PM
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I begin this essay by considering what the oxford dictionary says about of education which states that education is “a process of training and instruction especially of children and young people in school, colleges and other educational institutions which is designed to give knowledge and develop skills.” This definition portrays the educational system as a give and take system, whereby the recipients-students process the information given to them by the teachers to output skills.
There are three major ways in which human beings can gain knowledge, which is through listening, observing and reading. How we gain information really depends on the recipient. It is known that listening is a powerful tool in gaining knowledge but during conversations most people tend to be thinking of what to say next rather than listening. The idea being that the human mind can only expand on what it has already familiarized with. The most intelligent are well known for their extraordinary ability to comprehend things, signifieng their ability to connect pieces of information they have gathered before to develop a skill.
You can witness the experiences and thoughts that people have documented throughout the ages as a bridge to developing skills by simply reading a novel or a newspaper even a magazine. The brain begins to identify itself with a certain character in the book, critically analyzing the scenario whilst unconsciously familiarizing itself to the situation. The human has often been compared to the central processing unit due to the ability it possesses of obtaining knowledge and processing it to come up with new ideas.

This concept is manifested in the rapid development of technology in the global world today. A clear illustration of this fact is the new Titanic-- an amendment of the ancient titanic. The human mind merely created a better version after familiarizing with what was created before. Those who created an earoplane, took the time to observe a bird flying, we now have a diverse range of genetically modified plants, a result of scientists researching on the required factors for plant growth, in other words they went a mile further to familiarize themselves with the situation, bringing together formulas they have mastered throughout years of acquiring education to catalyze growth.
Education is a process the human mind undergoes everyday to create something. The
Human mind cannot create anything without being given the set of instructions which is
knowledge. In china they comfortably kill snakes and eat, again in some parts of India snakes are revered as objects of worship, in contrast to Babylon where snakes were trained to dance, according to the set
of instruction given to them. A clear testimony of the propensity of the human mind to expand on ideas to bring into existence a previously non-existent matter