The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one

Before schooling, the primary educational source of education children receive comes from
their parents. At around the age of five, although in recent years it has been shortened,
schooling offers a secondary socializing source. That is the reason why some educators claim
the purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

On the one hand, the information and education that parents provide is limited as they do not
have either the pedagogical tools or skills to academically educate children. Schools are said to
broaden children’s minds by offering them new context in which they can interact, not only
with other adults but also with other children of their age. Through these new interactions,
new social and technical abilities are shaped, knowledge of the world is moulded according to
their ages based upon a pedagogical basis. Recognizing pairs as “others” broaden their
universe, implicitly teaching them how to be emphatic.

On the other hand, it is also true that before starting compulsory schooling, children have
already received a vast myriad of informational thanks to the audiovisual tools that this digital
area provide. This media early consumers constantly receive information from all sorts of
channels. However, this information comes to their mind in a disorganized and most of the
time confusing form. In this respect, the function of schools is to help them organize the
informative chaos.

To sum up, schooling is vital as the way in which children can open their vision of the world,
either by being in contact with others or by organizing their input in a reasonable and
pedagogical way. Teachers should bear this in mind in order to adapt their contents to the
previous knowledge that children bring to school.