The original meaning of the word “education,” according to its Latin roots, is to lead out or bring forth that which lives within the human being. To truly educate is to nourish the unique and unfathomable possibilities that each child introduces into the world. Many teachers and most parents know this and, as individuals, seek to encourage the distinctive potentials of the children in their care. However, just as our understanding of human development is conditioned and constrained by a culture’s worldview, education is always shaped by a culture’s understanding of the child’s place in society, and of the human being’s place in nature and the cosmos.
Some cultures recognize that the emergence of a human personality is, ultimately, a profound mystery, and so they honor the deeper dimensions of the psyche, traditionally referring to them as the “soul” or “spiritual” aspects of the person. Other cultures hold fixed, instrumental, or ideological ideas about how a mature person should function in the world, and tend to ignore, or deny, the more mysterious, interior dimensions of the personality. In modern, technological culture, the human being is essentially defined as an economic unit—a producer and consumer playing a small specific part in a massive, interlocked, impersonal system of production. As Ivan Illich (1970) and other astute critics have observed, “education” in such a culture has little to do with bringing forth the person’s inner life but is reified as schooling—a standardized, mechanized system for delivering and controlling learning so that individuals can be assimilated smoothly into the economic order.