By Oliver Mills

Education is
transformation. It is creative and innovative thinking which provides
new perspectives, and different angles to issues or positions being
contemplated. Education is also about being moral, fair and just in
our dealings with others. It is an incremental unravelling of what
is, to achieve what it could be.

We tend to use the concept
education in a very narrow sense, by seeing it as schooling,
acquiring qualifications, or providing specific skills to function in
the practical areas. These are aspects of education, since education
deals with integration and wholeness. And this is one of the main
challenges education faces: integration versus fragmentation.

Some educators confuse
aspects with comprehensive knowledge. For example, an individual
might read for a general degree. But what really is involved here,
are a number of different subject areas with no specialisation. Each
subject making up the degree is different. When this individual wants
to pursue further studies, he or she might be told that there is no
specialty area, normally consisting of four subjects concentrated in
the area the individual wants to pursue further.

This person might have to
do additional, “make up” courses to meet the requirements. This
means spending extra time and resources. Sometimes the individual
might be required to do a “full degree over,” since many
institutions have different requirements.

What education is, and its
challenges then come to the forefront. It means institutions as
providers of education must be aware of the policies of other
providers, so as not to cause problems later on for their clients.

Normally, many persons do
not see education as a tool of transformation, making things
different and better. But this is really its nature. Through
innovative thinking, greater improvements result, making life more
convenient and richer. The new developments in technology testify to
this.

Improvement to better
health care, and what we eat, giving us a longer life, are also the
result of the impact of education in a wider, practical sense.
Educational research makes goods and services available which could
not be contemplated without it.

Here education has a
practical, transformative function, which goes beyond mere schooling.
Its challenge is to create awareness of this goal. Attending an
institution for the purpose of acquiring an education is one thing.
Using education to institute changes is realising its purpose. The
challenge of education then is to make this purpose clear to its
clients, and to create the relevant programmes to reflect this.
Education therefore involves both learning and doing, as well as
imparting skills and knowledge to enable individuals to transfer
these to practical situations, and to make transitions from one
function to the other.

When education provides
different angles to what is being discussed, it means it is not a
stagnant enterprise. It poses new questions, provides new and
different answers, and this enables persons to use their creativity
and problem solving skills to draw conclusions from the different
positions, and choose the most appropriate and reasonable solution to
the issues being discussed.

The education challenge is
therefore to make its practice relevant, even in contradictory
situations.

Being moral, fair and just
is a fundamental challenge education faces. This is because the onus
is not only on education, but also its subscribers. Many of the
latter tend to see education as being for the elite few, and not the
preserve of the many.

Education
then becomes a tool to facilitate the dominance of the few over the
many by denying opportunities through the use of various strategies.
Even education itself in the strict sense, through its requirements
tends to, not in a deliberate way, place barriers to some sectors of
society seeking to benefit from it. But this is because the elites
control it, and decide who gains entry.

We then find, that the
moral, just and fair basis on which education stands, are undermined,
not by education itself, but by the gatekeepers of society.

The challenge of education then, is to democratise the mind-sets of the gatekeepers, show how everyone benefits from being exposed to it, and demonstrate its contribution to the social, political, economic, technological and cultural areas of life.

OLIVER MILLS

Oliver Mills is a former lecturer in education at the University of the West Indies Mona Campus. He holds an M.Ed degree from Dalhousie University in Canada, an MA from the University of London and a post-graduate diploma in HRM and Training, University of Leicester. He is a past Permanent Secretary in Education with the government of the Turks and Caicos Islands