The Importance of Education

"Education in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to another."

In its earliest form, education was exercised through oral, story-telling. This later developed into written symbols and letters. Amongst the earliest and most important subjects were philosophy, psychology, maths and sociology.

At the base of education is communication, trading, gathering, and religion, but as cultures developed so did formal education, and ancient societies saw the evolution of schools. The system of formal education is broken up into five learning levels. Preschool, Primary school, Secondary school, Higher education, and Adult education. In America, secondary education did not emerge until 1910, when the combination of big business and technological advances required skilled workers. High schools at that time focused on practical skills. It wasn't too long ago that secondary school education was as far as most middle class students went. This was sufficient for employers as they were mostly concerned with practical experience. Moreover, university, or higher education, costed money and therefore wasn't accessible to the majority of capable workers.

As higher education becomes more mainstream, the subjects offered are becoming more varied and more niche. This is thanks to a number of factors. For starters business demands have expanded. When society was made up of church and state, career options were limited to teacher, doctor, lawyer, policemen, bankers and a few others. Now it is possible to be a search engine optimisation copywriter for an internet marketing agency, and roles get even more niche than that! What that means is that schools are offering courses in everything from basic maths to business writing for the web.

Secondly, as globalisation makes the world a smaller place, school curriculums are opening up to the idea of teaching subjects like world religions, South Asian politics, and North African history (for instance). This leads me to my final point about the importance of education, which is that it has the ability to prevent war, hate, and intolerance, and instead encourage peace and acceptance of one another.

People who have the privilege to learn about other cultures shouldn't take this for granted. By learning about customs, religions, and social structures from around the world, students are able to understand where people are coming from, not just geographically, but in terms of their ways of thinking and beliefs. People who don't have access to this knowledge can't possibly understand something that they haven't been told. This lack of awareness can often lead to intolerance.

So if you have the opportunity to take your students outside and expose them to the realities of the world they live in, in a positive and constructive way, then you should.


------

Fabric Architecture Ltd has been specialising in the design,
engineering, manufacture and installation of tensile fabric structures
since 1984. Learn more about Outdoor classroom at
http://www.fabricarchitecture.com/outdoor-classroom