7 The Concept Of Education

LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the end of this section, students will be able to:

1. Discuss the descriptive concept of education

2. Discuss the normative (or prescriptive) concept of education through
two approaches:
a. The concept of the educated man
b. The process of educating
3. Discuss the concept of teaching and activities in contrast to teaching,
namely drill, instructing, training, conditioning and indoctrination.
4. Discuss the concept of learning

THE DESCRIPTIVE CONCEPT OF EDUCATION

 “Education” describes:

1. What goes on in formal institutions of learning and non-formal

agencies.

2. What a system is concerned with:

a. The way the education is organized and arranged.
b. The methods of delivery or execution of educational policies.

3. What the Ministry and its official try to implement:

a. The whole set-up of agencies and personnel through whom the
government carries out its educational policies.
b. They include divisions, sub-divisions and agencies.

THE NORMATIVE CONCEPT OF EDUCATION

 Importance: To help us become clear as to what types of activities can be

referred as education, and what are the common criteria of education.

 There are two approaches; by looking at:

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1. The concept of the educated man

- Identify those qualities, skills, attitudes, etc. that enable us to
describe a person as an educated man.
- We can identify the norms, standards and criteria of education.

2. The process of educating

- Identify the characteristics and criteria of effective educational
activities.

1. The Concept of The Educated Man

a. Woodrow Wilson (in Akinpelu,1981) an American philosopher wrote:

“ The educated man is to be discovered by his point of view, by the temper of his
mind, by his attitude towards life and his fair way of thinking. He can see, he can
discriminate, he can combine ideas and see whether they lead; he has insight
and comprehension. His mind is a practiced instrument of appreciation. He is
more apt to contribute light than heat to a discussion, and will oftener than not
show the power of uniting the elements of a difficult subject in a whole view; he
has knowledge of the world which no one can have who knows only his own
generation or only his own task”.

 The above idea of an educated man highlights that:

i. All the qualities and aptitudes are individual-centered

ii. He is a man of virtue
iii. The emphasis is on the self, his mind, his ideas and his approach to
life.
iv. The term used to portray the educated man is a man of culture, and
of good taste.

b. R.S. Peters (1967, in Akinpelu, 1981) the British philosopher once stated:

i. The educated man is not only one who merely possesses specialized
skills. He may possess a specific knowledge but he also possesses a
body of knowledge together with the understanding. He has a
developed capacity to reason (the why of things). This is not a
matter of just being knowledgeable; for the understanding of an
educated person transforms how he see things. It makes a difference
to the level of life which he enjoys; for he has a backing for his
beliefs and conduct and organizes his experience in terms of
systematic conceptual schemes.

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ii. There is the suggestion that his understanding is not narrowly

specialized. He not only has breadth of understanding but is also
capable of connecting up these different ways of interpreting his
experience so that he achieves some cognitive reasoning.

iii. The educated person is one who is capable of doing and knowing
things for their own sake. He can enjoy in what he is doing without
always asking the question: And where is this going to get me?

 Peters’ idea of an educated man gives some views on the concept of

education; that it gives emphasis on:

1. The individual and his interests

2. The cognitive aspect of man
3. The intrinsic value of the activity
4. The idea that education is what goes on in the formal institutions of
learning.

2. The Process of Educating

 According to Peters (1973, in Akinpelu 1981) for a process or group of

processes to qualify as educational, there must be involved:

a. A conscious effort to bring about change in the state of mind of the

recipient. The change which is sought or achieved must be for the
better or toward what is desirable. Education is initiation into
worthwhile activities.

b. The change that is being brought about in the learner must be

intentional, deliberate, and directed towards a purpose. Education is a
purposeful activity; it is not a random activity – it is guided and
directed. It involves structuring and the resources in the environment
of the learner, or designing a curriculum or a program to produce the
desired change.

c. The learner must have some knowledge and understanding, some

“cognitive perspective”, of the activity. This is referred as “knowledge
condition”.

d. The knowledge or skill must be transmitted in a manner that is

morally and otherwise acceptable. To be morally acceptable, it must
involve the willing and voluntary participation of the learner; the
learner should not be forced to learn, nor deceived to learn. Therefore,
indoctrinating and conditioning people are not right because they seek
to force people to learn to believe what is being presented to them.

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e. For the education to be effective and easy, the content should be

presented in a way that fits the level of understanding or intelligence
of the learner.

THE CONCEPT OF TEACHING

 Teaching is the conscious and deliberate effort by a mature or experienced

person to impart information, knowledge, skills, etc. to an immature or less
experienced person, with the intention that the learner will learn or come
to believe what he is taught is good.

 The criteria of teaching are of five:

1. A person who is consciously and deliberately doing the teaching.

2. Another person who is being taught
3. Some content or material, information, knowledge and so on, that is
being imparted
4. An intention on the part of the person doing the act that the recipient
should learn.
5. The process of inducing the learning must be morally acceptable and
must be pedagogically sound.

 The activities that resembles teaching but do not considered as teaching:

1. Drill
- The repetition of a piece learning until one can recite or perform
it without mistakes.
- Drill may be part of teaching but it differs from it in being
excessively narrow in aim and content.
- It does not involve mush understanding or intelligence from a
person being drilled.
- It has intention but it is too narrow, being limited to specific and
simple learning tasks.

2. Instructing
- A little wider in scope than drilling but still narrower than
educating.
- It involves some use of intelligence.
- There is usually a one-sided activity in which an instructor gives
the order, or imparts knowledge of facts, rules, modes of
operating, etc, to a passive learner.

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3. Training
- Also a wider than instructing but narrower than educating.
- The aim of education: The successful performance of limited
ability or skills in the child rather than the development of its
entire personality.
- Examples: Training of doctors, lawyers, teachers etc.
- What brings them under training and not education is that in
them, the teaching is directed towards the acquisition of special
skills, and the evidence of learning is successful performance of
those skills.
- Thus, all other aspects of the personal education and
development, such as character or aesthetic education, are
secondary and often left out.
- Nowadays, educators use the concept of the “education of
teachers” or “education and training of teachers”. Teacher
Training College has been replaced by Teachers College.
- The idea: A teacher should acquire not merely the narrow
technical skills of teaching, but also a broad, general or liberal
education provided by courses as the foundations of education
and other enrichment programs.

4. Conditioning
- Some techniques which may involve the use of force or threat or
some other inducement to make the victim perform some action
contrary to his views.
- It refers to performance of action or formation of habits, while
brain-washing refers to beliefs, ideas and ideology.
- Does not involve learner’s willing co-operation.
- It aimed at not his intelligence, or understanding, but
performance and behavior.

5. Indoctrination
- To indoctrinate a person is to make a person accept certain
types of beliefs (doctrines and dogmas) in a way that shuts out
the learner’s ability or freedom to ask questions or raise doubts
about it.
- Teachers who indoctrinate in education are those who,
according to F.A. Davey (1972, in Akinpelu 1981):

“…make rules without explanation, who command needlessly,

who exact obedience without reason or who consider that their
authority can be established simply by appeals to convention,
indoctrinate in the most fundamental way. They create a closed,
self-validating judiciary and implant a distorted view of the
relationship which obtains between teacher and taught, superior
and subordinate and government and governed”.

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THE CONCEPT OF LEARNING

a. Kimble (1961): Learning is……

“….. a relatively permanent change in behavioral potentiality that

occurs as a result of reinforced practice”.

 Key concepts:

1. Learning is indexed by a change in behavior

> The results of learning must always be translated into observable
behavior.

2. The behavioral change is relatively permanent

> It is neither transitory nor fixed

3. The change in behavior need not occur immediately following the

learning experience.
> Although there may be a potential to act differently, this potential to act
may not be translated into behavior immediately.

4. The change in behavior (or behavior potentiality) results from

experience or practice.

5. The experience, or practice, must be reinforced

> Meaning that only those responses that lead to reinforcement will be
learned.
> Reinforcer: Any unconditioned stimulus – any stimulus that elicits a
natural and automatic reaction from an organism.

b. Woolfolk (2004): Learning….

“……occurs when experience causes relatively
permanent change in an individual’s knowledge or behavior.”

 Key concepts:
1. The change may be deliberate (intentional) or unintentional, for
better or worse, correct or incorrect, and conscious or
unconscious.

2. To qualify as learning, this change must be brought about by

experience – by the interaction of a person with his or her
environment.

3. Changes simply caused by maturation – such as growing taller or

turning gray, do not qualify as learning.

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4. Temporary changes resulting from illness, fatigue, or hunger are

also excluded from a general definition of learning.
> A person who has gone without food for two days does not learn to
be hungry, and a person who is ill does not learn to run more
slowly.

5. This definition specifies that the changes resulting from learning

are in the individual’s knowledge and behavior.

Compiled from the following references:

Akinpelu, J.A. (1981). An introduction to philosophy of education. London:

Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Woolfolk, A. (2004). Educational psychology. 9th Ed. New Jersey: Allyn & Bacon.

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