Meaning of Education

To read more about meaning of education click on the following link http://www.teachersmind.com/education.htm

21st century education

Click on the follwing link to read about 'Education in the 21st Century or Futuristic Education'
http://www.21stcenturyschools.com/What_is_21st_Century_Education.htm

Education in 21st Century - Futuristic Education

The 21st Century
The new millennium was ushered in by a dramatic technological revolution. We now live in an increasingly diverse, globalized, and complex, media-saturated society. According to Dr. Douglas Kellner at UCLA this technological revolution will have a greater impact on society than the transition from an oral to a print culture.1
Today's kindergarteners will be retiring in the year 2067. We have no idea of what the world will look in five years, much less 60 years, yet we are charged with preparing our students for life in that world. Our students are facing many emerging issues such as global warming, famine, poverty, health issues, a global population explosion and other environmental and social issues. These issues lead to a need for students to be able to communicate, function and create change personally, socially, economically and politically on local, national and global levels.
Even kindergarten children can make a difference in the world by participating in real-life, real-world service learning projects. You're never too young, or too old, to make your voice heard and create change that makes the world a better place.
Emerging technologies and resulting globalization also provide unlimited possibilities for exciting new discoveries and developments such as new forms of energy, medical advances, restoration of environmentally ravaged areas, communications, and exploration into space and into the depths of the oceans. The possibilities are unlimited.

21st Century Schools

The schools need to focus on developing 21st century skills. However, the believe that authentic education addresses the “whole child”, the “whole person”, and does not limit our professional development and curriculum design to workplace readiness holds true.
21st century skills learned through our curriculum, which is interdisciplinary, integrated, project-based, and more, include and are learned within a project-based curriculum by:
Collaboration – the ability to work in teams
Critical thinking – taking on complex problems
Oral communications – presenting
Written communications – writing
Technology – use technology
Citizenship – take on civic and global issues; service learning
Learn about careers – through internships
Content – conduct research and do all of the above

“School”, “Teacher”, “Learner” and “Curriculum” for the 21st Century
How should education be structured to meet the needs of students in this 21st century world? How do we now define “School”, “Teacher” “Learner” and "Curriculum"?
Schools in the 21st century will be laced with a project-based curriculum for life aimed at engaging students in addressing real-world problems, issues important to humanity, and questions that matter.
This is a dramatic departure from the factory-model education of the past. It is abandonment, finally, of textbook-driven, teacher-centered, paper and pencil schooling. It means a new way of understanding the concept of “knowledge”, a new definition of the “educated person”. A new way of designing and delivering the curriculum is required.
We offer the following new definitions for “School”, “Teacher” and “Learner” appropriate for the 21st century:
"Schools" will go “from ‘buildings’ to nerve centers, with walls that are porous and transparent, connecting teachers, students and the community to the wealth of knowledge that exists in the world.”
“Teacher” - From primary role as a dispenser of information to orchestrator of learning and helping students turn information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom.
The 21st century will require knowledge generation, not just information delivery, and schools will need to create a “culture of inquiry”.
"Learner” - In the past a learner was a young person who went to school, spent a specified amount of time in certain courses, received passing grades and graduated. Today we must see learners in a new context:
“First – we must maintain student interest by helping them see how what they are learning prepares them for life in the real world.
“Second – we must instill curiosity, which is fundamental to lifelong learning.
“Third – we must be flexible in how we teach.
“Fourth – we must excite learners to become even more resourceful so that they will continue to learn outside the formal school day.”
So what will schools look like, exactly? What will the curriculum look like? How will this 21st century curriculum be organized, and how will it impact the way we design and build schools, how we assess students, how we purchase resources, how we acquire and utilize the new technologies, and what does all this mean for us in an era of standardized testing and accountability?
Imagine a school in which the students – all of them – are so excited about school that they can hardly wait to get there. Imagine having little or no “discipline problems” because the students are so engaged in their studies that those problems disappear? Imagine having parents calling, sending notes, or coming up to the school to tell you about the dramatic changes they are witnessing in their children: newly found enthusiasm and excitement for school, a desire to work on projects, research and write after school and on weekends. Imagine your students making nearly exponential growth in their basic skills of reading, writing, speaking, listening, researching, scientific explorations, math, multimedia skills and more!
It is possible. It has happened, and is happening, in schools across the country. I have seen this first-hand with my classes, and I have seen it at other schools with whom I have worked. And there is growing evidence of schools everywhere having the same results when they implement a 21st century curriculum.

Development of Education in India

In the early Vedic period (beginning c. 1200 B.C.E.), an elite controlled the teaching of the four Vedas, the hymns and ritual practices of Aryan people who had migrated into north India in the previous century. Daughters as well as sons of higher-status families probably memorized these hymns and learned their meanings and associated ritual practices. Rishis, sages or seers who mostly belonged to the Brahman varna or caste, produced, transmitted, and controlled access to this knowledge. The Sanskrit of the Vedas was the language of classical learning, and proto-Hinduism was religious orthodoxy in the Vedic period. Respected teachers (gurus) taught apprentices pronunciation of the Vedas and all that it implied, as well as phonology, metrics, elementary grammar, and etymology, in return for the students' mundane services. This education was extra-institutional and closed to people of low status before the end of the Vedic period. In the modern era, nineteenth-and twentieth-century Hindu teachers of indigenous curricula frequently looked back to an idealized Vedic model for pedagogical inspiration.
In the sixth and fifth century B.C.E., historical founders Nigantha Nataputta (or Mahavira, the "Great Hero" of Jainism), and Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha, the "Enlightened One") created heterodox belief systems that monks elaborated, preserved, and taught to initiates. Buddhist monks congregated in monasteries (viharas), and provided itinerant teaching for laypeople. Elder monks taught the disciplines of the Sangha (the monastic order) as well as discourses on doctrine, spiritual exercises, and advanced philosophical ideas. Female converts created nunneries with similar practices. The Nalanda Mahavihara in Bihar and other great monasteries were centers of learning that included secular arts and sciences as well as theology. Mahaviharas flourished in northeastern India with royal support until they were destroyed at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In southern India, education was likewise linked to the ideas of Buddhist, Jaina, and Hindu teachings. Itinerant teachers carried ideas and the Sanskrit language to the south, where a Tamil prose and poetry tradition flourished from around 100 C.E. onwards.
Arab and Central Asian peoples brought Muslim educational models to the subcontinent in both the medieval and early modern periods. Within decades of the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632 C.E., Arab mariners began to trade, reside, and intermarry with local women in south India. Turkic peoples and other Central Asians raided northern India around 1000 C.E. and thereafter established several foreign-conquest empires. Muslim rulers promoted urban education by endowing libraries and literary societies. They also founded primary schools (maktabs) in which students learned reading, writing, and basic Islamic prayers, and secondary schools (madrasas) to teach advanced language skills, Koranic exegesis, prophetic traditions, Islamic law (shari a), and related subjects. Often attached to mosques, Islamic schools were open to the poor but were gender segregated, often only for boys. Muslim girls of affluent families studied at home, if they received any education beyond learning to recite the Koran. From the beginning of the Mughal empire in India in 1526 until the end of Mughal political presence in 1848, Persian was the court language, and elite boys could attend Persian schools to learn literature, history, ethics, law, administration, and court protocol. Subjects such as medicine, mathematics, and logic also formed an important part of the curriculum in centers for Islamic learning. More intimate settings for the spread of ideas were the retreats (khanqah) of famous Sufis (Muslims who professed mystic doctrines). These new educational models did not necessarily displace older ones, although state patronage patterns shifted. Sanskrit academies continued to teach young male Brahmans literature and law; apprenticeship and commercial schools taught boys the skills needed for business. Education for girls was the exception rather than the rule.

swami Vivekananda

click on the follwing link to read about educational philosophy of Swami Vivekananda
http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/archive/publications/ThinkersPdf/vivekane.pdf

Educational Philosophy of John Dewey

John Dewey (1859-1952) believed that learning was active and schooling unnecessarily long and restrictive. His idea was that children came to school to do things and live in a community which gave them real, guided experiences which fostered their capacity to contribute to society. For example, Dewey believed that students should be involved in real-life tasks and challenges:
maths could be learnt via learning proportions in cooking or figuring out how long it would take to get from one place to another by mule
history could be learnt by experiencing how people lived, geography, what the climate was like, and how plants and animals grew, were important subjects
Dewey had a gift for suggesting activities that captured the center of what his classes were studying.
Dewey's education philosophy helped forward the "progressive education" movement, and spawned the development of "experiential education" programs and experiments.

According to Dewey good education should have both a societal purpose and purpose for the individual student. For Dewey, the long-term matters, but so does the short-term quality of an educational experience. Educators are responsible, therefore, for providing students with experiences that are immediately valuable and which better enable the students to contribute to society.

Dewey argues that educators must first understand the nature of human experience.
Dewey's theory is that experience arises from the interaction of two principles -- continuity and interaction. Continuity is that each experience a person has will influence his/her future, for better or for worse. Interaction refers to the situational influence on one's experience. In other words, one's present experience is a function of the interaction between one's past experiences and the present situation. For example, my experience of a lesson, will depend on how the teacher arranges and facilitates the lesson, as well my past experience of similar lessons and teachers.
It is important to understand that, for Dewey, no experience has pre-ordained value. Thus, what may be a rewarding experience for one person, could be a detrimental experience for another.
The value of the experience is to be judged by the effect that experience has on the individual's present, their future, and the extent to which the individual is able to contribute to society.
Dewey says that once we have a theory of experience, then as educators can set about progressively organizing our subject matter in a way that it takes accounts of students' past experiences, and then provides them with experiences which will help to open up, rather than shut down, a person's access to future growth experiences, thereby expanding the person's likely contribution to society.
Dewey examines his theory of experience in light of practical educational problems, such as the debate between how much freedom vs. discipline to use. Dewey shows that his theory of experience (continuity and interaction) can be useful guides to help solving such issues.
Throughout, there is a strong emphasis on the subjective quality of a student's experience and the necessity for the teacher of understanding the students' past experiences in order to effectively design a sequence of liberating educational experiences to allow the person to fulfil their potential as a member of society.