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The Greek word ‘pedagogy’ is sometimes used for education which means ‘to discipline’, ‘to control’, ‘to instruct’ and ‘to teach’. According to John Dewey – “Education is the process of living through a continuous reconstruction of experiences” while Indira Gandhi had it that “Education is a liberating force and in our age, it is also a democratizing force, cutting across the barriers of caste and class, smoothing out inequalities imposed by birth and other circumstances” but I have grown to understand Education as a continuous and lifelong process.
It starts from the womb of the mother and continues till death. It is the process of development from infancy to maturity. It includes the effect of everything which influences human personality. Education must not be equated with schooling or formal education alone. It includes non-formal and informal modes of instruction and learning as well, including traditional learning acquired in the home and community. The understanding of the role of higher education in national development changed through history.
Just after the independence period, African universities were considered essential to nation building and development as they were a privileged source of human capital for leadership and public profession formation. Human capital, generated by education, training, experience, and non-formal learning, has significant positive impacts on economic development. In addition to material benefits such as fostering sustainable economic growth, productivity and earnings, there are non-material ones such as greater social cohesion, reduction of crime, better health and parenting.
However, many are not fully aware of these. Educational institutions have a paramount effect in the reproduction of social structures, which means that, as places of knowledge transmission, universities can play a transformative role.
Educational spaces are places of experimentation, social innovation and critical analysis and deconstruction. The vision that reduce universities to technical skills delivers recalls the colonial times in which higher education had the only aim of forming local functionaries, equipping them with functional tools for practical purposes.
The goal of education is to make people wiser, more knowledgeable, better informed, ethical, responsible, critical and capable of continuing to learn. Were all people to possess such abilities and qualities, the world’s problems would not be automatically solved, but the means and the will to address them would be at hand. Education also serves society by providing a critical reflection on the world, especially its failings and injustices, and by promoting greater consciousness and awareness, exploring new visions and concepts, and inventing new techniques and tools.
Education is also the means for disseminating knowledge and developing values and lifestyles, and for promoting public support for the continuing and fundamental changes that will be required if humanity is to alter its course, leaving the familiar path that is leading towards growing difficulties and possible catastrophe, and starting the uphill climb towards sustainability. Finally, with all this, we would widely agree that education is the most effective means that society possesses for confronting the challenges of the future. Indeed, education will shape the world of tomorrow.
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