With Prof. Edgar Nyanga
Education is expensive, however, ignorance is more than it, though ignorance is good as it is deemed that if one is not educated, they are better remaining so, an ignorant person about the law will not mind about breaking it because they don’t know.
Some of the costs of ignorance is that it is said not to be a defense at law.
The late president of Zambia, Michael Chilufya Sata fondly called those that were uneducated as cowards who cannot bring about development in the country.
Whether that is true or not, is a thought for another day. In this article, I would like to share information what education is.
Emmott (2013) posits that education is that which we learn from people around and nature/environment and has no end; acquisition of knowledge (education) continues until someone stops breathing.
Smith (2021) adds that education is a discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in community. It is classified into two parts; the formal education (guided) and the informal education (social).
Guided (formal) education system is one where we go to formal schools from early years. It leads us into having a livelihood (training). Communities gets bigger and wider to the extent that a formalised systems that will help all the community members learn together same things at the same time.
This is where schools are organised and learners and teachers who are employed to do the job of educating the community (nation) meet for the purpose of learning and teaching formally.
World wide, education is regarded as one of the most needed element of life for all citizens. Governments spend huge sums of money to ensure that all the people attain education. As society gradually attaches more and more importance to education, it also tries to formulate the overall objectives, content, organization, and strategies of education.
In Zambia, we have seen and read different pronouncements and implementation of policies that are aimed at ensuring that every citizen has education. Education is human right for all which must not be infringed or denied by anyone regardless of whether one has the resources to pay for it or not.
We all aware that there is a bursaries committee that looks at those who may not have the means to have the tertiary education (training). At primary level, the government has given it as a free gift as no one is made to pay for the education fees.
Informal education can be thought of as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a society. Seabright (2010) explicates that education is designed to guide people in learning a culture, molding forming up the behaviour in the ways of adulthood, and directing them toward their eventual role in society the entire environment and all activities are frequently viewed as learning places, where parents and all the adults are teachers to the young ones.
Education is the building block of both development and growth. Education brings about an inherent and permanent change in a person’s thinking and capacity to do things. It takes place everywhere and helps us to understand the past, present and future. Our ability to reason and take action is wrapped up with our feelings.
Appreciating what might be going on for all of us at a particular moment; thinking about the ways our emotions may be affecting things; and being open to what our instincts or intuitions are telling us are important elements of such reflection (Smith, 2021).
We need to examine the models and reasoning we are using in our daily lives. We also need to build new interpretations where needed for ourselves. Halpern (2010) avers that we should be looking to integrating new technology into our abstract.
Education is concerned not just with what we know and can do, but also with who we are, what we value, and our capacity to live life as well as we can. We need space to engage with these questions and help to appreciate the things we value.
As we learn to frame our beliefs we can better appreciate how they breathe life into our relationships and encounters, become our own, and move us to act. Education is forward-looking and hopeful. It looks to change for the better.
In the end our efforts at facilitating learning have to be judged by the extent to which they further the capacity to flourish and to share in life. For this reason we need also to attend to the concrete, the actual steps that can be taken to improve things.
In conclusion, having defined education, it clear that education should be championed for the sake of development and growth and this is where we begin from as one of the most important reasons why we need to appreciate what education is. As citizens of this world, we need to champion education for the sake of change ahead.
Professor Edgar Nyanga can be contacted on … [email protected]
Insightful ?