Possible in Education

Abstract

Education is a masterful word. Masterful comes from master, mastery, skills, virtuosity, expertise, teaching, and learning, making something possible. There is no one single social group whose members do not educate each other. Regardless of the level of development of a society, all its members are educated throughout their life cycle. Education may come through formal means, through schools, universities, religious education, and other institutions, or during daily experiences in the confrontation of day-to-day life, which demands multiple learning. To talk about education is to talk about our history, to think about the long life path in which we are subjects of a culture together with each other, in social interactions. To speak of education is to think of possibilities and to think of possibilities places us before limits, barriers, impossibilities. The word Education comes from the Latin verb educare that unfolds into two different meanings: dúcere, which means to take, guide, lead someone somewhere, and educare, which is linked to the sense of nurturing, raising (a child), and making (someone) grow. In this entry, we will talk about education in its formal dimension: one that involves human development processes, that generates the new, that demands teaching, that generates learning, and that requires creativity. We will discuss these processes in the light of the philosophy of education, cultural psychology, and the psychology of creativity, seeking to understand how educational acts transform human beings, (re)signifying their existential experiences and changing the world in which we live. Possibilities and impossibilities will be problematized throughout this discussion.