Paideia: What is Education, after all?
I like the way the ancient Greeks used the term, paideia, for "education" because, for them, the term also holds meanings that we capture with other parallel terms: "norm," "culture," "nurture," "reenactment," "playacting," and "socialization." As an ideal, "Paideia" was founded on the values necessary to build and sustain a community; that ideal implies that persons who live in isolation are not learning because education is always framed by social purposes and ends. I think all good education rests on that cluster of concerns (...and you guessed it, Robinson Crusoe is a bad model for education.) In that spirit, when we think about education, we should place the question, "how do we educate ourselves in concert?" at the center rather than "how do I, the individual instructor, educate you, the isolated student?"
[The following sections are  and I'll be developing them as time allows.]
Education and schooling are not the same.
No college worth its salt can claim to be educating its students just because it has a standard curriculum and even accredited degree requirements. Attending school and even getting good grades does not mean you are being educated. In fact, some observers have argued that schooling gets in the way of a true education -- that schools, when they emphasize regularity and routine, dampen our critical sense and merely give us tactics for navigating a bureaucratic maze instead of helping us learn to pose more powerful questions.
Posing more powerful questions is a cornerstone of learning. The philosopher, Martin Heidegger, is often quoted as saying that "you can't find god unless you go looking for him." (...or her). In that spirit, education is a quest that has its roots in the questions, "what?" "how?" and, most importantly, "why?"
Paolo Freire: an exponent of the distinction between schooling and education
Conversation is the core of every sound pedagogy.
In the19th-century it was said that the best education available was underway when Mark Hopkins (after whom Mark Hopkins Hall is named) and a student sat down together on a log for a conversation. The latest technology, comfortable settings, and approved textbooks were not the core of education; instead it was the conversation between teacher and student. The legendary teachers of history shared that same value, and every mode of teaching places conversation at its center
The missing dimension in teaching which conversation restores is listening. The art of conversation not only demands that one has interesting things to say but that one is first -- and last -- a good listener. In my view, good teaching requires good listening because only when the instructor knows how the student is thinking can there be any real progress in learning. Listening often takes place in a classroom, but it also takes place when the instructor pays close attention to student performance on exams, written assignments, and presentations. Part of evaluation is characterizing how the students have formulated their learning, and the obvious next step is re-engagin
One consequence that flows from this idea is that end-of-term exams are inadequate. If exams and essays play an integral role in a conversation, then they must punctuate the course so that the instructor has the opportunity to respond and re-direct the students' learning at those points where their learning is inadequate.
A second crucial corollary to "education as conversation" is that every course must include sufficient flexibility to address problematic issues as they arise and to clear away stumbling blocks to learning when they are encountered. A course is not an iron schedule with periodic exams to test the absorption levels of student learning. As a conversation -- a dialogue -- every course will move more quickly when student mastery is obvious and slow down to concentrate when problems with comprehension arise.
A parallel reaffirmation of this basic approach to education can be found in the following essays:
"Liberal Learning as Conversation" Liberal Education, Spring, 2001.
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