What Is Education?

Education is what’s left after you have forgotten the details. You may not remember the years of Napoleon’s reign, but did you learn to love the study of history? Exactly how Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer” ends may be a distant memory, but did you learn to love reading? Did you go on to read his equally great “Huckleberry Finn” and explore other authors? If you are a doctor, lawyer or other professional, you do need to remember facts and details, but was that the limit of your schooling or the beginning? Were you educated, or merely trained?

Education should shape the whole person and develop character. It is a thirst for knowledge, a mind open to exploration and wonder, a desire to understand.

Isidor Rabi was a boy with immigrant parents who went on the win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1944. When he was asked how he managed to accomplish that most impressive feat, he gave credit to his mother. When his friends came home from school, he said, the mothers all asked their children what they learned. When he came home from school, his mother asked: Izzy, did you ask a good question? Education is the art of asking good questions—intellectual curiosity, the pursuit of knowledge in any area. It never stops, has no time limit or boundaries. It is a lifelong quest. Talk to any person in extreme old age who is thriving, and you find someone who is endlessly curious.

The purpose of formal education is to inspire and to begin a process and a way of thinking that we develop on our own over time. It goes beyond the bounds of any one discipline and invites the study of new and unexplored areas. There are people who never studied music and can’t read a note but who love music nonetheless, read biographies of composers and attend concerts simply because it gives them great pleasure and moves them. Professional musicians may technically know more, but they don’t feel the experience any more than others who have engaged in their own musical education do.

Education has no intellectual borders: It is a professor of biology who enjoys the theatre, an optometrist who reads history, an engineer who loves art. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the most renowned school of engineering in the world, courses in the humanities are required.

There are two pillars of education. One is that education is a lifelong pursuit and the other is that it is comprehensive, not narrowly focused.

Education does not have a pension plan. It never retires. It lasts as long as people want to understand themselves and their world, as long as they take pleasure in the pursuit of knowledge. Degrees and diplomas are presented at a ceremony called “commencement.” Commencement means beginning. It does not mean the end of anything but rather the beginning of the voyage, the unquenchable thirst.

Education’s other pillar is comprehensiveness. Kenneth Clark’s magnum opus, “Civilisation,” originally a BBC television series and later a book, conveys an important message. It demonstrates that civilization does not exist in silos but is comprehensive. It grows organically. History, art, music, literature, architecture and even current events are the product of a culture. And culture contributes to our understanding of our society and ourselves. That study is open to all, young and old, people in every work and profession. Clark’s book  demonstrates that an understanding of history and our times makes knowledgeable citizens. It also made him optimistic: He concludes with the observation that “Western civilisation has been a series of rebirths” that should give us confidence in ourselves. He asserts that it is a lack of confidence that kills a civilization: “We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.”

“We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.”

Jews have been pioneers in the field of education. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called attention to the fact that “Jews set about creating the first system of publicly funded, universal education in history. By the end of the 1st century, it was complete. Jews became the people who predicated their survival on the house of study … From that day to this, they made education their highest communal priority. It allowed them to do what no other nation has done—preserve their identity intact across almost twenty centuries of exile, dispersion and powerlessness.” Jews have won and lost many battles over the millennia but survived amid loss because they understood one fundamental life lesson. In the words of Rabbi Sacks: “To defend a country, you need an army. But to defend a civilisation, you need schools.”

It must be pointed out that part of Jewish education is that it continues throughout adulthood in study partners (chavrusa), synagogue courses, institutional study with organizations such as Tikvah and Torah in Motion, along with many other means of continuing one’s knowledge. There is a great flourishing of Jewish study during and after formal studies have been completed.

The two pillars of education—lifelong learning and inclusivity, covering a wide range of topics—are essential for an informed and engaged citizenry. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) expressed the ideal in his noble ambition: “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.”

Dr. Paul Socken is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and founder of the Jewish Studies program at the University of Waterloo.