conclusion for importance of education

How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition (2000)

Chapter: 10 conclusions, 10 conclusions.

The pace at which science proceeds sometimes seems alarmingly slow, and impatience and hopes both run high when discussions turn to issues of learning and education. In the field of learning, the past quarter century has been a period of major research advances. Because of the many new developments, the studies that resulted in this volume were conducted to appraise the scientific knowledge base on human learning and its application to education. We evaluated the best and most current scientific data on learning, teaching, and learning environments. The objective of the analysis was to ascertain what is required for learners to reach deep understanding, to determine what leads to effective teaching, and to evaluate the conditions that lead to supportive environments for teaching and learning.

A scientific understanding of learning includes understanding about learning processes, learning environments, teaching, sociocultural processes, and the many other factors that contribute to learning. Research on all of these topics, both in the field and in laboratories, provides the fundamental knowledge base for understanding and implementing changes in education.

This volume discusses research in six areas that are relevant to a deeper understanding of students’ learning processes: the role of prior knowledge in learning, plasticity and related issues of early experience upon brain development, learning as an active process, learning for understanding, adaptive expertise, and learning as a time-consuming endeavor. It reviews research in five additional areas that are relevant to teaching and environments that support effective learning: the importance of social and cultural contexts, transfer and the conditions for wide application of learning, subject matter uniqueness, assessment to support learning, and the new educational technologies.

LEARNERS AND LEARNING

Development and learning competencies.

Children are born with certain biological capacities for learning. They can recognize human sounds; can distinguish animate from inanimate objects; and have an inherent sense of space, motion, number, and causality. These raw capacities of the human infant are actualized by the environment surrounding a newborn. The environment supplies information, and equally important, provides structure to the information, as when parents draw an infant’s attention to the sounds of her or his native language.

Thus, developmental processes involve interactions between children’s early competencies and their environmental and interpersonal supports. These supports serve to strengthen the capacities that are relevant to a child’s surroundings and to prune those that are not. Learning is promoted and regulated by the children’s biology and their environments. The brain of a developing child is a product, at the molecular level, of interactions between biological and ecological factors. Mind is created in this process.

The term “development” is critical to understanding the changes in children’s conceptual growth. Cognitive changes do not result from mere accretion of information, but are due to processes involved in conceptual reorganization. Research from many fields has supplied the key findings about how early cognitive abilities relate to learning. These include the following:

“Privileged domains:” Young children actively engage in making sense of their worlds. In some domains, most obviously language, but also for biological and physical causality and number, they seem predisposed to learn.

Children are ignorant but not stupid: Young children lack knowledge, but they do have abilities to reason with the knowledge they understand.

Children are problem solvers and, through curiosity, generate questions and problems: Children attempt to solve problems presented to them, and they also seek novel challenges. They persist because success and understanding are motivating in their own right.

Children develop knowledge of their own learning capacities— metacognition—very early. This metacognitive capacity gives them the ability to plan and monitor their success and to correct errors when necessary.

Children’ natural capabilities require assistance for learning: Children’s early capacities are dependent on catalysts and mediation. Adults play a critical role in promoting children’s curiosity and persistence by directing children’s attention, structuring their experiences, supporting their

learning attempts, and regulating the complexity and difficulty of levels of information for them.

Neurocognitive research has contributed evidence that both the developing and the mature brain are structurally altered during learning. For example, the weight and thickness of the cerebral cortex of rats is altered when they have direct contact with a stimulating physical environment and an interactive social group. The structure of the nerve cells themselves is correspondingly altered: under some conditions, both the cells that provide support to the neurons and the capillaries that supply blood to the nerve cells may be altered as well. Learning specific tasks appears to alter the specific regions of the brain appropriate to the task. In humans, for example, brain reorganization has been demonstrated in the language functions of deaf individuals, in rehabilitated stroke patients, and in the visual cortex of people who are blind from birth. These findings suggest that the brain is a dynamic organ, shaped to a great extent by experience and by what a living being does.

Transfer of Learning

A major goal of schooling is to prepare students for flexible adaptation to new problems and settings. Students’ abilities to transfer what they have learned to new situations provides an important index of adaptive, flexible learning; seeing how well they do this can help educators evaluate and improve their instruction. Many approaches to instruction look equivalent when the only measure of learning is memory for facts that were specifically presented. Instructional differences become more apparent when evaluated from the perspective of how well the learning transfers to new problems and settings. Transfer can be explored at a variety of levels, including transfer from one set of concepts to another, one school subject to another, one year of school to another, and across school and everyday, nonschool activities.

People’s abilitiy to transfer what they have learned depends upon a number of factors:

People must achieve a threshold of initial learning that is sufficient to support transfer. This obvious point is often overlooked and can lead to erroneous conclusions about the effectiveness of various instructional approaches. It takes time to learn complex subject matter, and assessments of transfer must take into account the degree to which original learning with understanding was accomplished.

Spending a lot of time (“time on task”) in and of itself is not sufficient to ensure effective learning. Practice and getting familiar with subject matter take time, but most important is how people use their time while

learning. Concepts such as “deliberate practice” emphasize the importance of helping students monitor their learning so that they seek feedback and actively evaluate their strategies and current levels of understanding. Such activities are very different from simply reading and rereading a text.

Learning with understanding is more likely to promote transfer than simply memorizing information from a text or a lecture. Many classroom activities stress the importance of memorization over learning with understanding. Many, as well, focus on facts and details rather than larger themes of causes and consequences of events. The shortfalls of these approaches are not apparent if the only test of learning involves tests of memory, but when the transfer of learning is measured, the advantages of learning with understanding are likely to be revealed.

Knowledge that is taught in a variety of contexts is more likely to support flexible transfer than knowledge that is taught in a single context. Information can become “context-bound” when taught with context-specific examples. When material is taught in multiple contexts, people are more likely to extract the relevant features of the concepts and develop a more flexible representation of knowledge that can be used more generally.

Students develop flexible understanding of when, where, why, and how to use their knowledge to solve new problems if they learn how to extract underlying themes and principles from their learning exercises. Understanding how and when to put knowledge to use—known as conditions of applicability—is an important characteristic of expertise. Learning in multiple contexts most likely affects this aspect of transfer.

Transfer of learning is an active process. Learning and transfer should not be evaluated by “one-shot” tests of transfer. An alternative assessment approach is to consider how learning affects subsequent learning, such as increased speed of learning in a new domain. Often, evidence for positive transfer does not appear until people have had a chance to learn about the new domain—and then transfer occurs and is evident in the learner’s ability to grasp the new information more quickly.

All learning involves transfer from previous experiences. Even initial learning involves transfer that is based on previous experiences and prior knowledge. Transfer is not simply something that may or may not appear after initial learning has occurred. For example, knowledge relevant to a particular task may not automatically be activated by learners and may not serve as a source of positive transfer for learning new information. Effective teachers attempt to support positive transfer by actively identifying the strengths that students bring to a learning situation and building on them, thereby building bridges between students’ knowledge and the learning objectives set out by the teacher.

Sometimes the knowledge that people bring to a new situation impedes subsequent learning because it guides thinking in wrong directions.

For example, young children’s knowledge of everyday counting-based arithmetic can make it difficult for them to deal with rational numbers (a larger number in the numerator of a fraction does not mean the same thing as a larger number in the denominator); assumptions based on everyday physical experiences can make it difficult for students to understand physics concepts (they think a rock falls faster than a leaf because everyday experiences include other variables, such as resistance, that are not present in the vacuum conditions that physicists study), and so forth. In these kinds of situations, teachers must help students change their original conceptions rather than simply use the misconceptions as a basis for further understanding or leaving new material unconnected to current understanding.

Competent and Expert Performance

Cognitive science research has helped us understand how learners develop a knowledge base as they learn. An individual moves from being a novice in a subject area toward developing competency in that area through a series of learning processes. An understanding of the structure of knowledge provides guidelines for ways to assist learners acquire a knowledge base effectively and efficiently. Eight factors affect the development of expertise and competent performance:

Relevant knowledge helps people organize information in ways that support their abilities to remember.

Learners do not always relate the knowledge they possess to new tasks, despite its potential relevance. This “disconnect” has important implications for understanding differences between usable knowledge (which is the kind of knowledge that experts have developed) and less-organized knowledge, which tends to remain “inert.”

Relevant knowledge helps people to go beyond the information given and to think in problem representations, to engage in the mental work of making inferences, and to relate various kinds of information for the purpose of drawing conclusions.

An important way that knowledge affects performances is through its influences on people’s representations of problems and situations. Different representations of the same problem can make it easy, difficult, or impossible to solve.

The sophisticated problem representations of experts are the result of well-organized knowledge structures. Experts know the conditions of applicability of their knowledge, and they are able to access the relevant knowledge with considerable ease.

Different domains of knowledge, such as science, mathematics, and history, have different organizing properties. It follows, therefore, that to

have an in-depth grasp of an area requires knowledge about both the content of the subject and the broader structural organization of the subject.

Competent learners and problem solvers monitor and regulate their own processing and change their strategies as necessary. They are able to make estimates and “educated guesses.”

The study of ordinary people under everyday cognition provides valuable information about competent cognitive performances in routine settings. Like the work of experts, everyday competencies are supported by sets of tools and social norms that allow people to perform tasks in specific contexts that they often cannot perform elsewhere.

Conclusions

Everyone has understanding, resources, and interests on which to build. Learning a topic does not begin from knowing nothing to learning that is based on entirely new information. Many kinds of learning require transforming existing understanding, especially when one’s understanding needs to be applied in new situations. Teachers have a critical role in assisting learners to engage their understanding, building on learners’ understandings, correcting misconceptions, and observing and engaging with learners during the processes of learning.

This view of the interactions of learners with one another and with teachers derives from generalizations about learning mechanisms and the conditions that promote understanding. It begins with the obvious: learning is embedded in many contexts. The most effective learning occurs when learners transport what they have learned to various and diverse new situations. This view of learning also includes the not so obvious: young learners arrive at school with prior knowledge that can facilitate or impede learning. The implications for schooling are many, not the least of which is that teachers must address the multiple levels of knowledge and perspectives of children’s prior knowledge, with all of its inaccuracies and misconceptions.

Effective comprehension and thinking require a coherent understanding of the organizing principles in any subject matter; understanding the essential features of the problems of various school subjects will lead to better reasoning and problem solving; early competencies are foundational to later complex learning; self-regulatory processes enable self-monitoring and control of learning processes by learners themselves.

Transfer and wide application of learning are most likely to occur when learners achieve an organized and coherent understanding of the material; when the situations for transfer share the structure of the original

learning; when the subject matter has been mastered and practiced; when subject domains overlap and share cognitive elements; when instruction includes specific attention to underlying principles; and when instruction explicitly and directly emphasizes transfer.

Learning and understanding can be facilitated in learners by emphasizing organized, coherent bodies of knowledge (in which specific facts and details are embedded), by helping learners learn how to transfer their learning, and by helping them use what they learn.

In-depth understanding requires detailed knowledge of the facts within a domain. The key attribute of expertise is a detailed and organized understanding of the important facts within a specific domain. Education needs to provide children with sufficient mastery of the details of particular subject matters so that they have a foundation for further exploration within those domains.

Expertise can be promoted in learners. The predominant indicator of expert status is the amount of time spent learning and working in a subject area to gain mastery of the content. Secondarily, the more one knows about a subject, the easier it is to learn additional knowledge.

TEACHERS AND TEACHING

The portrait we have sketched of human learning and cognition emphasizes learning for in-depth comprehension. The major ideas that have transformed understanding of learning also have implications for teaching.

Teaching for In-Depth Learning

Traditional education has tended to emphasize memorization and mastery of text. Research on the development of expertise, however, indicates that more than a set of general problem-solving skills or memory for an array of facts is necessary to achieve deep understanding. Expertise requires well-organized knowledge of concepts, principles, and procedures of inquiry. Various subject disciplines are organized differently and require an array of approaches to inquiry. We presented a discussion of the three subject areas of history, mathematics, and science learning to illustrate how the structure of the knowledge domain guides both learning and teaching.

Proponents of the new approaches to teaching engage students in a variety of different activities for constructing a knowledge base in the subject domain. Such approaches involve both a set of facts and clearly defined principles. The teacher’s goal is to develop students’ understanding of a given topic, as well as to help them develop into independent and thoughtful problem solvers. One way to do this is by showing students that they already have relevant knowledge. As students work through different prob-

lems that a teacher presents, they develop their understanding into principles that govern the topic.

In mathematics for younger (first- and second-grade) students, for example, cognitively guided instruction uses a variety of classroom activities to bring number and counting principles into students’ awareness, including snack-time sharing for fractions, lunch count for number, and attendance for part-whole relationships. Through these activities, a teacher has many opportunities to observe what students know and how they approach solutions to problems, to introduce common misconceptions to challenge students’ thinking, and to present more advanced discussions when the students are ready.

For older students, model-based reasoning in mathematics is an effective approach. Beginning with the building of physical models, this approach develops abstract symbol system-based models, such as algebraic equations or geometry-based solutions. Model-based approaches entail selecting and exploring the properties of a model and then applying the model to answer a question that interests the student. This important approach emphasizes understanding over routine memorization and provides students with a learning tool that enables them to figure out new solutions as old ones become obsolete.

These new approaches to mathematics operate from knowledge that learning involves extending understanding to new situations, a guiding principle of transfer ( Chapter 3 ); that young children come to school with early mathematics concepts ( Chapter 4 ); that learners cannot always identify and call up relevant knowledge (Chapters 2 , 3 , and 4 ); and that learning is promoted by encouraging children to try out the ideas and strategies they bring with them to school-based learning ( Chapter 6 ). Students in classes that use the new approaches do not begin learning mathematics by sitting at desks and only doing computational problems. Rather, they are encouraged to explore their own knowledge and to invent strategies for solving problems and to discuss with others why their strategies work or do not work.

A key aspect of the new ways of teaching science is to focus on helping students overcome deeply rooted misconceptions that interfere with learning. Especially in people’s knowledge of the physical, it is clear that prior knowledge, constructed out of personal experiences and observations— such as the conception that heavy objects fall faster than light objects—can conflict with new learning. Casual observations are useful for explaining why a rock falls faster than a leaf, but they can lead to misconceptions that are difficult to overcome. Misconceptions, however, are also the starting point for new approaches to teaching scientific thinking. By probing students’ beliefs and helping them develop ways to resolve conflicting views, teachers can guide students to construct coherent and broad understandings of scientific concepts. This and other new approaches are major break-

throughs in teaching science. Students can often answer fact-based questions on tests that imply understanding, but misconceptions will surface as the students are questioned about scientific concepts.

Chèche Konnen (“search for knowledge” in Haitian Creole) was presented as an example of new approaches to science learning for grade school children. The approach focuses upon students’ personal knowledge as the foundations of sense-making. Further, the approach emphasizes the role of the specialized functions of language, including the students’ own language for communication when it is other than English; the role of language in developing skills of how to “argue” the scientific “evidence” they arrive at; the role of dialogue in sharing information and learning from others; and finally, how the specialized, scientific language of the subject matter, including technical terms and definitions, promote deep understanding of the concepts.

Teaching history for depth of understanding has generated new approaches that recognize that students need to learn about the assumptions any historian makes for connecting events and schemes into a narrative. The process involves learning that any historical account is a history and not the history. A core concept guiding history learning is how to determine, from all of the events possible to enumerate, the ones to single out as significant. The “rules for determining historical significance” become a lightening rod for class discussions in one innovative approach to teaching history. Through this process, students learn to understand the interpretative nature of history and to understand history as an evidentiary form of knowledge. Such an approach runs counter to the image of history as clusters of fixed names and dates that students need to memorize. As with the Chèche Konnen example of science learning, mastering the concepts of historical analysis, developing an evidentiary base, and debating the evidence all become tools in the history toolbox that students carry with them to analyze and solve new problems.

Expert Teachers

Expert teachers know the structure of the knowledge in their disciplines. This knowledge provides them with cognitive roadmaps to guide the assignments they give students, the assessments they use to gauge student progress, and the questions they ask in the give-and-take of classroom life. Expert teachers are sensitive to the aspects of the subject matter that are especially difficult and easy for students to grasp: they know the conceptual barriers that are likely to hinder learning, so they watch for these tell-tale signs of students’ misconceptions. In this way, both students’ prior knowledge and teachers’ knowledge of subject content become critical components of learners’ growth.

Subject-matter expertise requires well-organized knowledge of concepts and inquiry procedures. Similarly, studies of teaching conclude that expertise consists of more than a set of general methods that can be applied across all subject matter. These two sets of research-based findings contradict the common misconception about what teachers need to know in order to design effective learning environments for students. Both subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical knowledge are important for expert teaching because knowledge domains have unique structures and methods of inquiry associated with them.

Accomplished teachers also assess their own effectiveness with their students. They reflect on what goes on in the classroom and modify their teaching plans accordingly. Thinking about teaching is not an abstract or esoteric activity. It is a disciplined, systematic approach to professional development. By reflecting on and evaluating one’s own practices, either alone or in the company of a critical colleague, teachers develop ways to change and improve their practices, like any other opportunity for learning with feedback.

Teachers need expertise in both subject matter content and in teaching.

Teachers need to develop understanding of the theories of knowledge (epistemologies) that guide the subject-matter disciplines in which they work.

Teachers need to develop an understanding of pedagogy as an intellectual discipline that reflects theories of learning, including knowledge of how cultural beliefs and the personal characteristics of learners influence learning.

Teachers are learners and the principles of learning and transfer for student learners apply to teachers.

Teachers need opportunities to learn about children’s cognitive development and children’s development of thought (children’s epistemologies) in order to know how teaching practices build on learners’ prior knowledge.

Teachers need to develop models of their own professional development that are based on lifelong learning, rather than on an “updating” model of learning, in order to have frameworks to guide their career planning.

LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Tools of technology.

Technology has become an important instrument in education. Computer-based technologies hold great promise both for increasing access to knowledge and as a means of promoting learning. The public imagination has been captured by the capacity of information technologies to centralize and organize large bodies of knowledge; people are excited by the prospect of information networks, such as the Internet, for linking students around the globe into communities of learners.

There are five ways that technology can be used to help meet the challenges of establishing effective learning environments:

Bringing real-world problems into classrooms through the use of videos, demonstrations, simulations, and Internet connections to concrete data and working scientists.

Providing “scaffolding” support to augment what learners can do and reason about on their path to understanding. Scaffolding allows learners to participate in complex cognitive performances, such as scientific visualization and model-based learning, that is more difficult or impossible without technical support.

Increasing opportunities for learners to receive feedback from software tutors, teachers, and peers; to engage in reflection on their own learning processes; and to receive guidance toward progressive revisions that improve their learning and reasoning.

Building local and global communities of teachers, administrators, students, parents, and other interested learners.

Expanding opportunities for teachers’ learning.

An important function of some of the new technologies is their use as tools of representation. Representational thinking is central to in-depth understanding and problem representation is one of the skills that distinguish subject experts from novices. Many of the tools also have the potential to provide multiple contexts and opportunities for learning and transfer, for both student-learners and teacher-learners. Technologies can be used as learning and problem-solving tools to promote both independent learning and collaborative networks of learners and practitioners.

The use of new technologies in classrooms, or the use of any learning aid for that matter, is never solely a technical matter. The new electronic technologies, like any other educational resource, are used in a social environment and are, therefore, mediated by the dialogues that students have with each other and the teacher.

Educational software needs to be developed and implemented with a full understanding of the principles of learning and developmental psychology. Many new issues arise when one considers how to educate teachers to use new technologies effectively: What do they need to know about learning processes? What do they need to know about the technologies? What kinds of training are most effective for helping teachers use high-quality instructional programs? Understanding the issues that affect teachers who will be using new technologies is just as pressing as questions of the learning potential and developmental appropriateness of the technologies for children.

Assessment to Support Learning

Assessment and feedback are crucial for helping people learn. Assessment that is consistent with principles of learning and understanding should:

Mirror good instruction.

Happen continuously, but not intrusively, as a part of instruction.

Provide information (to teachers, students, and parents) about the levels of understanding that students are reaching.

Assessment should reflect the quality of students’ thinking, as well as what specific content they have learned. For this purpose, achievement measurement must consider cognitive theories of performance. Frameworks that integrate cognition and context in assessing achievement in science, for example, describe performance in terms of the content and process task demands of the subject matter and the nature and extent of cognitive activities likely to be observed in a particular assessment situation. The frameworks provide a basis for examining performance assessments that are designed to measure reasoning, understanding, and complex problem solving.

The nature and purposes of an assessment also influence the specific cognitive activities that are expressed by the student. Some assessment tasks emphasize a particular performance, such as explanation, but deemphasize others, such as self-monitoring. The kind and quality of cognitive activities observed in an assessment situation are functions of the content and process demands of the tasks involved. Similarly, the task demands for process skills can be conceived along a continuum from constrained to open. In open situations, explicit directions are minimized in order to see how students generate and carry out appropriate process skills as they solve problems. Characterizing assessments in terms of components of competence and the content and process demands of the subject matter brings specificity to assessment objectives, such as “higher level thinking” and “deep understanding.” This approach links specific content with the

underlying cognitive processes and the performance objectives that the teacher has in mind. With articulated objectives and an understanding of the correspondence between task features and cognitive activities, the content and process demands of tasks are brought into alignment with the performance objectives.

Effective teachers see assessment opportunities in ongoing classroom learning situations. They continually attempt to learn about students’ thinking and understanding and make it relevant to current learning tasks. They do a great deal of on-line monitoring of both group work and individual performances, and they attempt to link current activities to other parts of the curriculum and to students’ daily life experiences.

Students at all levels, but increasingly so as they progress through the grades, focus their learning attention and energies on the parts of the curriculum that are assessed. In fact, the art of being a good student, at least in the sense of getting good grades, is tied to being able to anticipate what will be tested. This means that the information to be tested has the greatest influence on guiding students’ learning. If teachers stress the importance of understanding but then test for memory of facts and procedures, it is the latter that students will focus on. Many assessments developed by teachers overemphasize memory for procedures and facts; expert teachers, by contrast, align their assessment practices with their instructional goals of depth-of-understanding.

Learning and Connections to Community

Outside of formal school settings, children participate in many institutions that foster their learning. For some of these institutions, promoting learning is part of their goals, including after-school programs, as in such organizations as Boy and Girl Scout Associations and 4–H Clubs, museums, and religious education. In other institutions or activities, learning is more incidental, but learning takes place nevertheless. These learning experiences are fundamental to children’s—and adults’ —lives since they are embedded in the culture and the social structures that organize their daily activities. None of the following points about the importance of out-of-school learning institutions, however, should be taken to deemphasize the central role of schools and the kinds of information that can be most efficiently and effectively taught there.

A key environment for learning is the family. In the United States, many families hold a learning agenda for their children and seek opportunities for their children to engage with the skills, ideas, and information in their communities. Even when family members do not focus consciously on instructional roles, they provide resources for children’s learning that are relevant to school and out-of-school ideas through family activities, the funds of

knowledge available within extended families and their communities, and the attitudes that family members display toward the skills and values of schooling.

The success of the family as a learning environment, especially in the early years, has provided inspiration and guidance for some of the changes recommended in schools. The rapid development of children from birth to ages 4 or 5 is generally supported by family interactions in which children learn by observing and interacting with others in shared endeavors. Conversations and other interactions that occur around events of interest with trusted and skilled adults and child companions are especially powerful environments for learning. Many of the recommendations for changes in schools can be seen as extensions of the learning activities that occur within families. In addition, recommendations to include families in classroom activities and educational planning hold promise of bringing together two powerful systems for supporting children’s learning.

Classroom environments are positively influenced by opportunities to interact with parents and community members who take interest in what they are doing. Teachers and students more easily develop a sense of community as they prepare to discuss their projects with people who come from outside the school and its routines. Outsiders can help students appreciate similarities and differences between classroom environments and everyday environments; such experiences promote transfer of learning by illustrating the many contexts for applying what they know.

Parents and business leaders represent examples of outside people who can have a major impact on student learning. Broad-scale participation in school-based learning rarely happens by accident. It requires clear goals and schedules and relevant curricula that permit and guide adults in ways to help children learn.

Designing effective learning environments includes considering the goals for learning and goals for students. This comparison highlights the fact that there are various means for approaching goals of learning, and furthermore, that goals for students change over time. As goals and objectives have changed, so has the research base on effective learning and the tools that students use. Student populations have also shifted over the years. Given these many changes in student populations, tools of technology, and society’s requirements, different curricula have emerged along with needs for new pedagogical approaches that are more child-centered and more culturally sensitive, all with the objectives of promoting effective learning and adaptation (transfer). The requirement for teachers to meet such a diversity of challenges also illustrates why assessment needs to be a tool to help teach-

ers determine if they have achieved their objectives. Assessment can guide teachers in tailoring their instruction to individual students’ learning needs and, collaterally, inform parents of their children’s progress.

Supportive learning environments, which are the social and organizational structures in which students and teachers operate, need to focus on the characteristics of classroom environments that affect learning; the environments as created by teachers for learning and feedback; and the range of learning environments in which students participate, both in and out of school.

Classroom environments can be positively influenced by opportunities to interact with others who affect learners, particularly families and community members, around school-based learning goals.

New tools of technology have the potential of enhancing learning in many ways. The tools of technology are creating new learning environments, which need to be assessed carefully, including how their use can facilitate learning, the types of assistance that teachers need in order to incorporate the tools into their classroom practices, the changes in classroom organization that are necessary for using technologies, and the cognitive, social, and learning consequences of using these new tools.

First released in the Spring of 1999, How People Learn has been expanded to show how the theories and insights from the original book can translate into actions and practice, now making a real connection between classroom activities and learning behavior. This edition includes far-reaching suggestions for research that could increase the impact that classroom teaching has on actual learning.

Like the original edition, this book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions. When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods—to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb.

How People Learn examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn. The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. This new knowledge calls into question concepts and practices firmly entrenched in our current education system.

Topics include:

• How learning actually changes the physical structure of the brain.
• How existing knowledge affects what people notice and how they learn.
• What the thought processes of experts tell us about how to teach.
• The amazing learning potential of infants.
• The relationship of classroom learning and everyday settings of community and workplace.
• Learning needs and opportunities for teachers.
• A realistic look at the role of technology in education.

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• Our Mission

What Is Education For?

Read an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson, which calls for redesigning education for the future.

What is education for? As it happens, people differ sharply on this question. It is what is known as an “essentially contested concept.” Like “democracy” and “justice,” “education” means different things to different people. Various factors can contribute to a person’s understanding of the purpose of education, including their background and circumstances. It is also inflected by how they view related issues such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. Still, not having an agreed-upon definition of education doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it or do anything about it.

We just need to be clear on terms. There are a few terms that are often confused or used interchangeably—“learning,” “education,” “training,” and “school”—but there are important differences between them. Learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. Education is an organized system of learning. Training is a type of education that is focused on learning specific skills. A school is a community of learners: a group that comes together to learn with and from each other. It is vital that we differentiate these terms: children love to learn, they do it naturally; many have a hard time with education, and some have big problems with school.

There are many assumptions of compulsory education. One is that young people need to know, understand, and be able to do certain things that they most likely would not if they were left to their own devices. What these things are and how best to ensure students learn them are complicated and often controversial issues. Another assumption is that compulsory education is a preparation for what will come afterward, like getting a good job or going on to higher education.

So, what does it mean to be educated now? Well, I believe that education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

This core purpose of education can be broken down into four basic purposes.

Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided. There is a deep correlation between our experience of the world around us and how we feel. As we explored in the previous chapters, all individuals have unique strengths and weaknesses, outlooks and personalities. Students do not come in standard physical shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. They all have their own aptitudes and dispositions and different ways of understanding things. Education is therefore deeply personal. It is about cultivating the minds and hearts of living people. Engaging them as individuals is at the heart of raising achievement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Many of the deepest problems in current systems of education result from losing sight of this basic principle.

Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others. There are various definitions of culture, but in this context the most appropriate is “the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups.” To put it more bluntly, it is “the way we do things around here.” Education is one of the ways that communities pass on their values from one generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences. For others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance. As the world becomes more crowded and connected, it is becoming more complex culturally. Living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative.

There should be three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures.

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent. This is one of the reasons governments take such a keen interest in education: they know that an educated workforce is essential to creating economic prosperity. Leaders of the Industrial Revolution knew that education was critical to creating the types of workforce they required, too. But the world of work has changed so profoundly since then, and continues to do so at an ever-quickening pace. We know that many of the jobs of previous decades are disappearing and being rapidly replaced by contemporary counterparts. It is almost impossible to predict the direction of advancing technologies, and where they will take us.

How can schools prepare students to navigate this ever-changing economic landscape? They must connect students with their unique talents and interests, dissolve the division between academic and vocational programs, and foster practical partnerships between schools and the world of work, so that young people can experience working environments as part of their education, not simply when it is time for them to enter the labor market.

Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens. We live in densely woven social systems. The benefits we derive from them depend on our working together to sustain them. The empowerment of individuals has to be balanced by practicing the values and responsibilities of collective life, and of democracy in particular. Our freedoms in democratic societies are not automatic. They come from centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy and those who foment sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Those struggles are far from over. As John Dewey observed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

For a democratic society to function, it depends upon the majority of its people to be active within the democratic process. In many democracies, this is increasingly not the case. Schools should engage students in becoming active, and proactive, democratic participants. An academic civics course will scratch the surface, but to nurture a deeply rooted respect for democracy, it is essential to give young people real-life democratic experiences long before they come of age to vote.

Eight Core Competencies

The conventional curriculum is based on a collection of separate subjects. These are prioritized according to beliefs around the limited understanding of intelligence we discussed in the previous chapter, as well as what is deemed to be important later in life. The idea of “subjects” suggests that each subject, whether mathematics, science, art, or language, stands completely separate from all the other subjects. This is problematic. Mathematics, for example, is not defined only by propositional knowledge; it is a combination of types of knowledge, including concepts, processes, and methods as well as propositional knowledge. This is also true of science, art, and languages, and of all other subjects. It is therefore much more useful to focus on the concept of disciplines rather than subjects.

Disciplines are fluid; they constantly merge and collaborate. In focusing on disciplines rather than subjects we can also explore the concept of interdisciplinary learning. This is a much more holistic approach that mirrors real life more closely—it is rare that activities outside of school are as clearly segregated as conventional curriculums suggest. A journalist writing an article, for example, must be able to call upon skills of conversation, deductive reasoning, literacy, and social sciences. A surgeon must understand the academic concept of the patient’s condition, as well as the practical application of the appropriate procedure. At least, we would certainly hope this is the case should we find ourselves being wheeled into surgery.

The concept of disciplines brings us to a better starting point when planning the curriculum, which is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. The four purposes above suggest eight core competencies that, if properly integrated into education, will equip students who leave school to engage in the economic, cultural, social, and personal challenges they will inevitably face in their lives. These competencies are curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. Rather than be triggered by age, they should be interwoven from the beginning of a student’s educational journey and nurtured throughout.

From Imagine If: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D and Kate Robinson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Sir Kenneth Robinson and Kate Robinson.

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Essay on Importance of Education

• Updated on  
• Aug 17, 2023

Education is very important for success in life. A well-educated person not only succeeds in life but also takes his society and country to new heights. Education develops essential skills like decision-making, problem-solving, and mental agility. Education helps a person to be self-aware and to solve problems in personal and professional life. In this article, we have provided an essay on the importance of education and points to note before writing the same. Moreover, you would find short essays and long essays that can be used to present in school.

Check out our 200+ Essay Topics for School Students in English .

Table of Contents

• 1 Points to Note While Writing an Essay on the Importance of Education
• 2 10 Lines on the Importance of Education
• 3 Importance of Education Sample Essay (100 words)
• 4 Importance of Education Sample Essaneighbouringy (250 words)
• 5 Importance of Education Sample Essay (400 words)
• 6 10 Popular Quotes on Education
• 7 What Will Your Child Learn From This Essay on the Importance of Education?

Points to Note While Writing an Essay on the Importance of Education

Certain points must be included while writing an essay. It makes the essay more detailed and helps the reader to understand the topic in a better way. An essay on the importance of education must include the following.

• While writing a short essay make sure that it is to the point 
• A longer essay must contain an introduction, body, and conclusion.
• Facts about education and the personal perspective of the writer must be included
• Think about the importance of educated individuals in society and write about them
• You can also write about the job market and the role education plays in it.

Also Read: Essay on Democracy

10 Lines on the Importance of Education

Education is important for several reasons. Here are 10 lines on the importance of education that can be added to the essay. Students can also describe these points to make the essay more descriptive and coherent.

• Education is a basic need for every individual to live in the modern world
• Education helps us to understand technological systems and services
• An educated person can easily take up a job based on interest 
• Without an education, a person will lose the opportunity to be successful in life
• Moreover, education protects an individual from being cheated and exploited by others
• Educated citizens are a valuable asset to the company
• It also helps society to adapt to change and discard old and unproductive ways of conduct and thinking 
• Thus, it enables all sections of society to prosper 
• Particularly, it enables poor sections of society to prosper and develop
• Education helps an individual to uplift the society and community
• Education is extremely important for the development of individuals. Hence, children from all sections of society must be educated.

Also, Read; Essay on My Aim in Life

Importance of Education Sample Essay (100 words)

Education is crucial for the importance of the nation and its citizens. Education is about gathering knowledge and training the mind to think. Moreover, it helps a person to apply the knowledge gained to solve problems.  Education is important in the modern world, as it helps a person to learn about the world and new technologies. It can also empower people and help them to gain employment opportunities . Educated individuals can impart their knowledge to the next generation and thus contribute to society.  They also contribute to the development of the nation and society in general. Thus, the importance of education can’t be denied.

Importance of Education Sample Essaneighbouringy (250 words)

Men and women have to be educated as it helps in the development of a healthy society.  Educated individuals help in the progress of society. It is the highly educated individuals who lay the basic foundation of a developed country. Moreover, education helps in the personal development and empowerment of individuals. It develops in a person the knowledge, and critical thinking skills required to be successful in life. These skills increase self-awareness and help individuals to make informed decisions. Thus, people gain a deeper understanding of the world around them and help them to follow their interests, passions, and talents.

Education helps in growth and innovation. A well-educated workforce is more skilled and productive. Thus, they are more competitive in the global marketplace. Research , technological advancements, and entrepreneurship skills can all be credited to educated individuals. It is the sword that can be used against misinformation and ignorance. A well-educated person is more likely to make a good decision and resist manipulation. Moreover, education promotes healthy lifestyles among individuals.  Educated people are more likely to follow a healthy lifestyle and preventive healthcare measures. 

In conclusion, we can say that education helps in societal advancement and economic, and personal development. It helps individuals to make informed decisions and pushes society for innovation and growth. Education helps to uproot illiteracy and inequality in society. It encourages individuals to take better care of themselves and the environment they live in. Moreover, it encourages people to understand their duties, rights , and responsibilities toward their country.

Importance of Education Sample Essay (400 words)

Education is important for the development of the individual, nation, and society. It empowers individuals to take better decisions for themselves and for the environment they live in. Education provides an individual with the knowledge and skills that are necessary to navigate the complexities of life. It is crucial for personal growth, societal development, and global progress.

Education empowers an individual to think critically and develop analytical skills. It ignites curiosity in humans and encourages them to explore, learn and adapt to changes. Moreover, it helps individuals to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and set meaningful goals. Thus, it helps in the holistic development of an individual. Thus, a well-educated individual can contribute to the progress of the society. It develops empathy, and tolerance, and contributes to a stable and prosperous community. It also helps in the reduction of social inequalities and discrimination and encourages people to actively participate in the democratic functioning of the government. When individuals have access to education it means that they can get employment opportunities as well. Thus, education can help in eradicating poverty and increase economic growth. Moreover, it helps in increasing the living standards of families.

Globally, education helps to drive innovation, develop international cooperation, and deal with global issues. Scientific breakthroughs, advancement of technology, and innovations are all a result of education. Moreover, it helps in cross-cultural understanding and exchange of values and ideas. Global challenges such as climate change, and medical issues can be easily dealt with due to education. Society becomes better equipped to provide sustainable solutions for the betterment of all.

 Education can break down gender inequalities. Therefore, it can empower women and marginalized sections of the community. When societies recognize the importance of education, it helps in promoting equitable access to opportunities. Educating the girl child can result in a reduction in child mortality rates. Thus, it helps in social progress.

The importance of education can’t be denied. It results in personal development, international collaboration, and the development of society. Education provides knowledge and skills that are necessary for navigating through the challenges of life. Moreover, it helps in progress of the society and dealing with global challenges like environmental crises. Thus, education helps in creating a prosperous, and just world.  Education can help an individual achieve his dreams and aspirations. Most of the successful people in the world are educated. In the future educated individual will be a person who knows and can apply it to solve problems.

10 Popular Quotes on Education

Here are 10 popular quotes on education. Feel free to add them to your essay on importance of education or similar academic topics.

‘Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.’ – Albert Einstein

‘Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.’ – Dr APJ Abdul Kalam

‘Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.’ – Malcolm X

‘The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.’ – Martin Luther King Jr.

‘The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited.”‘- Plutarch

‘Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.’ – John Dewey

‘Education is the key to unlocking the world, a passport to freedom.’ – Oprah Winfrey

‘The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn…and change.’ – Carl Rogers

Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.’ – Confucius

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.’ – Benjamin Franklin

What Will Your Child Learn From This Essay on the Importance of Education?

An essay on the importance of education will help a student to learn to express ideas and knowledge simply. It will also help them to express their ideas in a lengthy format. 

An essay on the importance of education will help a student understand the significance of education in the modern world. Moreover, it will make them realize the privilege of a good education later in life.

Also Read: Essay on My Brother in 200 Words

Ans. Education helps a person develop critical thinking and decision-making skills. It helps empower a person to deal with the personal and professional challenges of life. An educated person can make rational and informed decisions while dealing with challenges.

Ans. Education helps in the development of the mind, and the growth of society and the nation. An educated society is an empowered society. Individuals of such a society can make informed decisions and can work towards the social, economic, and political development of the nation.

Ans. The main aim of education is to acquire knowledge and skills. It helps a person adjust to the environment and achieve goals.

Check out our Popular Essay Topics for Students

This was all about essay on the importance of education. We hope the samples listed above will help students with their essay writing practice. For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu.

Blessy George

Blessy George works as a Content Marketing Associate at Leverage Edu. She has completed her M.A. in Political Science and has experience working as an Intern with CashKaro. She has written extensively on studying abroad, English Test preparation, visas, and online courses. During her free time, she likes to read and write poetry, and songs.

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The turning point: Why we must transform education now

Global warming. Accelerated digital revolution. Growing inequalities. Democratic backsliding. Loss of biodiversity. Devastating pandemics. And the list goes on. These are just some of the most pressing challenges that we are facing today in our interconnected world.

The diagnosis is clear: Our current global education system is failing to address these alarming challenges and provide quality learning for everyone throughout life. We know that education today is not fulfilling its promise to help us shape peaceful, just, and sustainable societies. These findings were detailed in UNESCO’s Futures of Education Report in November 2021 which called for a new social contract for education.

That is why it has never been more crucial to reimagine the way we learn, what we learn and how we learn. The turning point is now. It’s time to transform education. How do we make that happen?

Here’s what you need to know. 

Why do we need to transform education?

The current state of the world calls for a major transformation in education to repair past injustices and enhance our capacity to act together for a more sustainable and just future. We must ensure the right to lifelong learning by providing all learners - of all ages in all contexts - the knowledge and skills they need to realize their full potential and live with dignity. Education can no longer be limited to a single period of one’s lifetime. Everyone, starting with the most marginalized and disadvantaged in our societies, must be entitled to learning opportunities throughout life both for employment and personal agency. A new social contract for education must unite us around collective endeavours and provide the knowledge and innovation needed to shape a better world anchored in social, economic, and environmental justice.  

What are the key areas that need to be transformed?

• Inclusive, equitable, safe and healthy schools

Education is in crisis. High rates of poverty, exclusion and gender inequality continue to hold millions back from learning. Moreover, COVID-19 further exposed the inequities in education access and quality, and violence, armed conflict, disasters and reversal of women’s rights have increased insecurity. Inclusive, transformative education must ensure that all learners have unhindered access to and participation in education, that they are safe and healthy, free from violence and discrimination, and are supported with comprehensive care services within school settings. Transforming education requires a significant increase in investment in quality education, a strong foundation in comprehensive early childhood development and education, and must be underpinned by strong political commitment, sound planning, and a robust evidence base.

• Learning and skills for life, work and sustainable development

There is a crisis in foundational learning, of literacy and numeracy skills among young learners. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, learning poverty has increased by a third in low- and middle-income countries, with an estimated 70% of 10-year-olds unable to understand a simple written text. Children with disabilities are 42% less likely to have foundational reading and numeracy skills compared to their peers. More than 771 million people still lack basic literacy skills, two-thirds of whom are women. Transforming education means empowering learners with knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to be resilient, adaptable and prepared for the uncertain future while contributing to human and planetary well-being and sustainable development. To do so, there must be emphasis on foundational learning for basic literacy and numeracy; education for sustainable development, which encompasses environmental and climate change education; and skills for employment and entrepreneurship.

• Teachers, teaching and the teaching profession

Teachers are essential for achieving learning outcomes, and for achieving SDG 4 and the transformation of education. But teachers and education personnel are confronted by four major challenges: Teacher shortages; lack of professional development opportunities; low status and working conditions; and lack of capacity to develop teacher leadership, autonomy and innovation. Accelerating progress toward SDG 4 and transforming education require that there is an adequate number of teachers to meet learners’ needs, and all education personnel are trained, motivated, and supported. This can only be possible when education is adequately funded, and policies recognize and support the teaching profession, to improve their status and working conditions.

• Digital learning and transformation

The COVID-19 crisis drove unprecedented innovations in remote learning through harnessing digital technologies. At the same time, the digital divide excluded many from learning, with nearly one-third of school-age children (463 million) without access to distance learning. These inequities in access meant some groups, such as young women and girls, were left out of learning opportunities. Digital transformation requires harnessing technology as part of larger systemic efforts to transform education, making it more inclusive, equitable, effective, relevant, and sustainable. Investments and action in digital learning should be guided by the three core principles: Center the most marginalized; Free, high-quality digital education content; and Pedagogical innovation and change.

• Financing of education

While global education spending has grown overall, it has been thwarted by high population growth, the surmounting costs of managing education during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the diversion of aid to other emergencies, leaving a massive global education financial gap amounting to US$ 148 billion annually. In this context, the first step toward transformation is to urge funders to redirect resources back to education to close the funding gap. Following that, countries must have significantly increased and sustainable financing for achieving SDG 4 and that these resources must be equitably and effectively allocated and monitored. Addressing the gaps in education financing requires policy actions in three key areas: Mobilizing more resources, especially domestic; increasing efficiency and equity of allocations and expenditures; and improving education financing data. Finally, determining which areas needs to be financed, and how, will be informed by recommendations from each of the other four action tracks .

What is the Transforming Education Summit?

UNESCO is hosting the Transforming Education Pre-Summit on 28-30 June 2022, a meeting of  over 140 Ministers of Education, as well as  policy and business leaders and youth activists, who are coming together to build a roadmap to transform education globally. This meeting is a precursor to the Transforming Education Summit to be held on 19 September 2022 at the UN General Assembly in New York. This high-level summit is convened by the UN Secretary General to radically change our approach to education systems. Focusing on 5 key areas of transformation, the meeting seeks to mobilize political ambition, action, solutions and solidarity to transform education: to take stock of efforts to recover pandemic-related learning losses; to reimagine education systems for the world of today and tomorrow; and to revitalize national and global efforts to achieve SDG-4.

• More on the Transforming Education Summit
• More on the Pre-Summit

Related items

• Future of education
• SDG: SDG 4 - Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

This article is related to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals .

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Education Essay Samples: Choose Yours to Get A+

What is an essay on education?

It’s a paper that students write in school or college to tell why education is important (1). The rules of structuring and formatting it are standard:

•  Hook readers and introduce a thesis. 
•  Provide arguments and evidence in the body to support your statement. 
•  Write a conclusion restating the thesis and summarizing the body. 

In this article, you’ll find three samples of education essays. All are of different lengths. Choose one that fits your assignment best, and feel free to use it as an example for writing your paper like a boss.

Importance of Education: Essay (250 words)

When asked to write an essay about the importance of education, check this sample for inspiration.

College Essay on Importance of Education (300 words)

A 300-word paper has a more complex structure. You can divide it into three paragraphs. Or, create a five-paragraph story with three parts in a body. It all depends on how you craft a thesis and how many arguments you have.

Bonus: How to Write a 300 Words Essay

500 Word Essay on Why Education Is Important

“Why is education important” essay can be long, too. If you get an assignment to write a 500+ word paper on this topic, here you have a sample to check.

What is education essay?

It is a short academic paper students write in school or college to explain the importance of education to the audience. It has a corresponding thesis statement and requires arguments and evidence to prove its relevance.

What is the purpose of education essay?

The purpose (2) is to explain the role of education and persuade readers of this idea with arguments and evidence.

 When writing, a student can use facts, statistics, and examples to support the arguments. Topics are numerous, but all relate to the idea that education is crucial for young generations and society in general.

How long is an essay on why education is important?

The length varies from 150 to 750 words. It depends on the assignment or how in-depth you intend to go on the topic and structure your academic paper.

Thus, a 150-word paper will be one paragraph, which is prevalent for middle school students. For 500-word essays, the structure is as follows: education essay introduction, body, and conclusion.

The longer your essay, the more structured and in-depth it will be.

Ready to Write Your Essay on Education?

I hope the examples from this article have helped you learn how to write an essay on importance of education. Whatever the length, please structure it accordingly: Follow the rules of academic writing. Use arguments and provide evidence.

An essay on education isn’t that challenging to write. Don’t be afraid to share your thoughts on the topic. Even a controversial idea works if you know how to spark readers with it.

References:

• https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/10-reasons-why-is-education-important/
• https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/purpose-education
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Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

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• Noddings, Nel, 1984, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Acknowledgments

The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer 2018 update of this entry.

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Importance of Education in the Life of People Essay

Introduction, works cited.

Receiving higher education is an important step in life of every person. High school is also a kind of valuable experience that allows a person to think over future professional perspectives and define how it can help him/her understand which professional and intellectual paths to take. However, facing the challenges that other people encounter when dropping school discourages other people to make important decisions in difficult situations.

Specifically, reluctance to learn can lead to unpredictable consequences in life. My personal experience and encounter with other people who gave up their education proves that lack of ambitions and goals in life can deprive a person of professional fulfillment and personal realization in various spheres of life. Certainly, general phrases will not impress anybody and, therefore, I decided to elaborate on my personal experience and a person who changed my outlook on education system, as well as the rules triggering individuals’ decision to give up studying.

At the current moment, I study at Arizona high school. So far, studying at school was not a big deal for me because of ignorance of future perspectives for my personal and professional growth. However, I have two brothers who have had a great influence on my growing awareness of the necessity to continue my education. I was aware of the fact that Arizona laws permit to drop out studying as soon as you are 16 years old. This legal procedure played a bad joke with my brothers who decided to leave school. They made a difficult choice to hire for a job and gain experience in leading an independent life.

However, independence at this early age is not always an advantage. Adolescents do not always behave in a reasonable way because of difficult psychological, social, and emotional factors. There are always occasions when teenagers escape from the learning environment because of bullying, or because of difficulties in communication with peers. In such a manner, they lost a chance to think of their future and professional prospects. They also lose a chance to look at their live from another angle. Probably, my elder brother could have opened his restaurant business because of his incredible leadership and management skills, but lack of education did not allow him to move further.

Now, the fate discouraged him and made him spend 8 months in jail. Now he does work at restaurant, but as a waiter. Probably, he could have had a brilliant opportunity to fulfill himself and take up a course on business management. I am still hoping that he will pull himself together and take a second chance. There are many other possibilities to study and take part-time jobs. Unfortunately, he is the eldest brother and he was the only one to rely on while making difficult decisions. However, I believe that better educational and social programs could reverse the mistake made by my brother.

Sometimes, somebody else’s mistakes allow other people to change their mind and take another path of personal development. So did I. Because of my brother’s experience, I realized that education provides an access to better life in case you are ambitious enough to advance your skills and abilities in a specific academic area, should it be restaurant management or nursing. Studying at school is a kind of extension for an adult life.

Being a teenager, there is no guarantee that you are psychologically and emotionally mature to make difficult decisions and take responsibilities for your life. So, giving up school at the age of 16 is not reasonable because it is almost impossible to find a prestigious job at this age. Therefore, learning in high schools should be obligatory for all teenagers irrespective of state, social status, and material level. A person should feel support on the part of parents and teachers to be able to understand what he/she wants to do in life. Otherwise, it is possible to face a difficult situation as my brothers did.

Elementary and fundamental stages of studying should be available to all people irrespective of statuses and nationalities. It will help young people understand the value of education. More importantly, education is a powerful tool for receiving the access to intellectual freedom and education. The educational establishment, therefore, should be storehouse of knowledge, experience, and information for students to draw inspiration for personal advancement. Teachers must be perceived as guides of knowledge and protectors of individual goals and concerned expressed by their students. Such an ideal of an educational system should have been presented in our state.

Then, my brothers would not have dropped their studies. Some might say that my brothers could have stayed as students to continue their professional path, but their self-confidence or reluctance became major obstacle to better future. Now my younger brother is 18. He has no job and no place to live. Unlike me, he followed our elder brother’s example and stop thinking about education. Still, I do not quite understand why my brother was so overwhelmed with the desire to leave education.

He was so young to make such important decisions, but being so critical about it made me think that something was wrong with the school environment and teaching approaches. We are best friends and he always tells me about everything that is going on in his life, but this time the decision he made was unpredictable for me.

There is an assumption that a 16-year-old person is not emotionally ready to lead an independent life and make a decision to drop out school. However, leaving schools contributes to reducing your chance to enrich life with interesting knowledge and experience. Probably, lack of incentives proposed by school program does not allow the adolescents to understand the actual benefits of learning, for instance, chemistry, conduct researchers, or at least learning something (Bohannon-Kaplan 17).

I can also admit that parents’ influence is not of the least importance in this situation, but counselors should be able to apprehend the teenagers and make them suspend their decisions. There should be a much consistent framework that would influence the behavior and actions that teenagers reveal rashly. High percentage of teenagers leaving school indicates low level of care and teachers’ awareness of the problem. They should be more concerned with their future and design specific courses and classes dedicated to communication and understanding of teenagers’ behavioral patterns. Finally, they should become more aware of the major factors triggering difficult teenagers to give up courses.

The emergence of new social programs both in education and outside it could have helped my brothers correct their mistakes and improve their lives. They are young and talented enough to proceed with learning and advancing their skills. Besides, my elder brother has realized that life has not ended yet and there is still an opportunity to change their future. As per my younger brother, I will do my best to become a model for him so that he realized that receiving education is not the worst choice that he can make. As a proof, I graduated from school and joined the navy. Education made my dreams come true.

However, it is not all about education, but about an attitude to it. Recently, I have looked through a book to learn more about teenagers’ behavior so as to be able to help my brothers think over the benefits that education can propose. Specifically, I have come across some useful recommendations that could have been applied in our school. Benson’s research shows, “according to a recent nationwide survey of more than 218000 students in grades 6-12, 50 percent support nighttime community curfews for teens” (170). This would have been the best option for my brother.

Recollecting the past experience of my brothers, as well as looking at the current possibilities in education provide me with the hope that everything can be changed for the better. Though my brothers had a bad experience, I am still grateful to them for the conclusions I made for myself. Creating a positive atmosphere and develop positive thinking are priorities in introducing a new educational and development programs in schools and other educational establishments (Nelsen and Lott 24). Students should not be afraid of the challenges waiting for them in schools. On the contrary, they should be in anticipation of something unknown, but definitely interesting.

Unfortunately, the current Arizona laws do not foresee any changes in educational programs because the government expects teenagers to become much more independent. On the one hand, such an option is effective for youth to define whether they are ambitious and strong enough start life without proper education. On the other hand, it is necessary to define whether the reasons adolescents leave schools are connected with teachers’ approaches or not. So, if no changes are ensured in an academic field, further improvements should provide outside it. In particular, there should be specific social programs designed to encourage teenagers to advance their professional skills and upgrade knowledge in a specific scientific sphere. Once again, my brothers made me understand the importance of introducing such programs.

I feel sorry for my brothers not having open up their interests, potentials and problems. The current programs existing in other states, however, could have changed their future and have provided them with new visions and perspectives for advancing their skills. This is of particular concern to my elder brother who could have learnt about techniques to suppress his rebellious spirit and think over further steps of self-fulfillment.

In conclusion, I should admit that my brothers’ experience is valuable for me because it allowed me to estimate my changes for successful professional future without education. They also made me change my outlook on the importance of education lives of teenagers. In particular, I have realized that education is not just about learning various subjects; it is also a school of life where teachers and counselors show us how to behave in an appropriate way and make importance decisions. Finally, my brothers made me take a closer look at the gaps in existing education because better educational and social programs would allow my brothers reassess their lives and continue their education. Intellectual freedom is a key to successful professional accomplishment.

Benson, Peter L. What Teens Need to Succeed . US: ReadHowYouWant, 2009. Print.

Bohannon-Kaplan, Margaret. Youth Apprenticeships: What Teens Want . US: Wellington Publications, 2008. Print.

Nelsen, Jane and Lynn Lott. Positive Discipline for Teenagers . US: Prima Pub. 1994. Print.

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Bibliography

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27 Facts on the Importance of Education (Essay or Speech)

Are you in need of ideas for an importance of education essay?

Here is a list of 27 ideas that will get you started!

These ideas come from a variety of online sources and links have been provided in case you need to provide references in your essay .

This article lists ideas on the importance of education to a person’s life (Points 1 – 16) and to society (Points 17 – 27).

Importance of Education to a Person’s Life

1. education helps people out of poverty.

Poverty is linked to low education . Families that are poor are usually less educated than families that are rich. Plus, if you are born into a low educated poor family, chances are high that you too will end up low educated and poor.

One way poverty affects education is through the direct costs. Even when school is free, the costs of uniforms, travel, and so on can be very difficult for families to cover.

To escape the poverty trap cycle , people need to gain a higher education than their parents and find upwardly mobile employment (this means: jobs that help you get from the working class into the middle class).

Here’s some facts to back up this point.

A recent report found that people with a college education are statistically less likely to be in poverty. Of people over the age of 25, only 2% of college graduates were in poverty. That compares to 13% of high school graduates over 25.

Related Article: How Can Health Influence Learning?

2. Education helps People make More Money

Jobs that require a higher education are usually more highly paid than unskilled jobs. This is because the jobs are more difficult and require a more specialized skillset. If you get an education in a skill area where there is a shortage of available workers, your wages will increase.

To underscore this point, Brookings presented findings that show:

“An individual with a college degree is nearly nine times more likely to make over $100,000 than someone with only a high school diploma and 13 times more likely to make more than $200,000 per year.”

Today, jobs that are in demand, require a high education and pay quite well include:

• Software developer (USD $101,000)
• Health care administrator (USD $98,000)
• Medical Technologist (USD $51,000)

Source: CNBC .

3. Highly Educated People have a Better chance of Getting a Job

Jobs are not that easy to come by these days – even for people with degrees. But there’s statistically a higher chance of you getting a job if you have a higher education.

The 2017 report Education Pays: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society found that people with higher education have lower rates of unemployment.

In 2015, younger people (ages 25 – 34) with bachelor’s degrees had an unemployment rate of 2.6%. High school graduates of the same age range had an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent.

That’s a huge difference that underscores the correlation between education and employability.

>>>You Might Also Like: 21+ Ways to Make an Essay Longer

4. Highly Educated People are Statistically Healthier

Statistically, the higher your education, the healthier you are. This could potentially be due to a few factors including:

• Stable jobs with regular hours allow you to plan exercise;
• Cultural differences between working-class and middle-class people;
• More money to participate in recreational activities.

Whatever the reason, the facts stand for themselves. One of the major facts is this:

In 2014, 26% of high school graduates smoked cigarettes. In the same year, only 8% of college graduates smoked cigarettes.

Source: Education Pays: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society

5. Highly Educated People Volunteer More

Educated people tend to do better when it comes to volunteering. The reasons for this may be very similar to the reasons for being more fit. Reasons could include:

• Stable jobs with regular hours allow time to plan regular volunteering hours;
• Highly educated people are less likely to work two jobs;
• People who are well educated have more money to travel to and from their volunteering locations.

Again, it’s a good idea to back this claim up with some facts.

In 2015, 39% of college graduates reported that they volunteered that year. Among high school graduates, it was just 16% who reported that they volunteered.

6. Education helps People make Better Decisions

We have already established that people with a higher education have more job security and more money.

The flow-on effect of this is that they can make better decisions.

When you are more certain that you have money coming in every week, you’ll be able to plan our your budget more. You’ll also have the money to make decisions about living in safer neighborhoods with more public services.

Furthermore, higher education usually teaches critical thinking skills . This means people who’ve been trained in critical thinking may have an advantage when making tough decisions. They will have the education to know how to handle complex decision-making processes.

7. Education helps People make Long-Term Decisions

Not only will highly educated people have the skillset to make tough decisions, they will also have the money to make long-term decisions.

If you have a stable job with a high income each month, you’re more likely to get a loan for a home. You also have the freedom to start investing into your retirement funds.

As you can see, the correlation between high education and high incomes has huge flow-on effects for quality of life.

8. Education can increase Social Status

An education from a respected educational institution can open lots of doors for you.

Many students from around the world flock to nations like the United Kingdom, United States and Australia to get degrees from top-ranking education nations.

Similarly, if you make it to a higher-ranking school or university such as Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford or Princeton you’ll get a lot of social status just for having attended the university.

Even at compulsory school age there are elite institutions. For example, the private school named Eton College in the UK is known for producing no less than 19 British Prime Minsters .

When you get social status from going to a good school or university, we say you have institutional or cultural capital .

This degree from a well-respected university may get you that job interview you were looking for. But, it could also get you social status amongst family, friends and – yes – potential future partners!

9. Education makes People better Conversationalists

Have you ever had a conversation with a person and they were just really interesting? They seemed to know a lot of things and be able to talk to you about anything.

Well, that person is likely very well educated.

In fact, we have some words to describe people who are well-educated in a broad range of topics. You could call them:

• A renaissance man
• A renaissance woman

There is also a type of education designed to help you become a polymath. It’s called a Liberal Education and you get it by doing a Liberal Arts Degree from a university.

10. Education helps People get Access to Important Information

In the dark ages in Europe very few people had the ability to read.

This meant that knowledge held in books was only available to very few people.

When people don’t have access to knowledge, they’re in a very vulnerable situation. They can’t educate themselves on important information and have a harder time making decisions.

Nowadays, most people in the developed world can read. This huge advance in education levels has enabled any of us to go out there and access information.

In fact, you’re doing that right now! Aren’t you glad you can read?

Educated people also have the knowledge about how to access important information. We’re taught at school about encyclopaedias and libraries. At university we’re taught about scholarly sources and how to access them .

Combine the ability to read with the skills to access information and anyone can help educate themselves on anything. You just need a basic level of education to get started!

11. Education enables People to Critically Analyze ideas

At school, you’re not just being taught facts.

You’re also being taught how to think.

This ability to think involves some pretty advanced strategies like:

• Skepticism: The reluctance to believe something until you see the facts;
• Critical Thinking : the ability to look at something from multiple perspectives;
• Analytical Thinking : the ability to investigate something deeply to find answers.

With these fantastic skills, you can go a long way! You’re less likely to be tricked into believing something that’s not true. You’ll also be able to think things through and come to reasonable, rational conclusions.

12. Education can Help People (especially Women) become Independent and Powerful

Women’s education is a major focus of the United Nations.

This is because many women who are not educated are dependent on their families or husbands to make money.

When women become educated, they can become independent . They can work in better paid jobs, move into more powerful positions in workplaces, and earn an income that’s independent of their husbands.

In the long run, this will mean that women have an equal say in the development of our world.

Furthermore, women with jobs can contribute financially to their families which can help move the whole family out of poverty and give them a better standard of living.

Read Also: Why is School Important?

13. Education reduces Unplanned Pregnancies and Sexual Diseases

Basic education on sex and relationships can dramatically reduce sexual diseases and unplanned pregnancies.

Here’s some facts:

The Borgen Project cites that completion of primary school will reduce a person’s chances of getting HIV. In fact, it reduces girls’ chances of contracting the illness 3-fold.

Educated people also have smaller families and they have them later in life. In Mali , women with a high school education have an average of 3 children. Women without a high school education have an average of 7 children.

14. Education helps us Realize our own Potential

Through education, we learn about what we like and don’t like. We learn all about things from science, math, languages and history.

After contemplating all of these different topics, we’ll be more capable of living our best life.

If you don’t get educated, you won’t open up your horizons and learn about the world. You may end up being stuck in an insular life without having experienced all the great things life has to offer.

You don’t need to go to school for this. Maybe being educated for you is just about reading books on a lot of different topics.

Either way, by educating yourself, you can realize your potential and live a more meaningful life.

15. Education can bring Enjoyment to People’s Lives

Unfortunately, it’s often overlooked that education can be pleasurable for its own sake.

I’ve talked all about how education can help people out of poverty, get them jobs, make them more powerful and less sick.

But it’s also important to remember that education can simply be enjoyable and therefore be important for helping you be happy.

Have you ever learned something really cool and just been glad you know that information now?

That’s what I mean by education being a fun activity on its own.

When people are learning just because they love learning, we say they are intrinsically motivated . This is the opposite to extrinsic motivation where people learn things so they can get a reward like a better job.

16. Education makes you more Tolerant

There is some evidence that highly educated people may be more tolerant than lowly educated people.

To take just one example, people from Latin America with a high school education are 45% more tolerant toward people with HIV than Latin Americans with only an elementary school education.

Similarly, Lorelle Espinosa argues that colleges are ideal locations for teaching tolerance. She argues:

The foundations of tolerance run deep in the college classroom, where students learn and confront new ideas, issues and experiences at times vastly different than their own.

This is, of course, if you have a good teacher who’ll teach you different people’s perspectives!

>>>You Might Also Like: How to Write a Top University Essay

Importance of Education to Society

17. education prevents diseases in society.

Health education in classrooms can make an entire society healthier and live longer.

Health care education helps people avoid risky activities and behaviors, conduct basic first aid when someone is injured, and learn when they need to see a doctor.

The Population Reference Bureau argues that education of women on matters of health is especially important because they often set the standards for household behaviors like regularly washing your hands.

Educating children on health is also very important for the future health of a society.

That’s why Save the Children spends a lot of money on health education in developing countries. Here’s what they say the benefit of education is for children’s health:

Most importantly, through education, students learn how to adapt their daily habits to improve their health, nutrition, hygiene and prevent HIV and AIDS, gaining these important skills and behaviors for life.

18. Education helps a Country’s Economy Grow

When the population of a country is more educated, the whole country gets wealthier. This surely highlights the importance of education!

Here’s some facts that might be useful for you:

Hanushek and Wobmann (2010) looked at the evidence on the links between economic growth and education. They found that good quality education systems have a strong connection to long-term economic growth in a society.

Here’s their conclusion:

Economic growth is strongly affected by the skills of workers. What people know matters.

Hassan and Rafaz (2017) looked at economic growth in Pakastan between 1990 and 2016. They argue that:

[A] 1% increase in female education, female labour force participation, education expenditure and fertility rate causes 96% increase in GDP of Pakistan

Woah! Education of women appears to be a powerful way of increasing the wealth of entire societies.

19. Education can attract High Paying Jobs of the 21 st Century

You might have heard that manufacturing and factory jobs are becoming pretty rare in developed nations.

Because the high paying jobs of the future won’t be in unskilled labor. Those jobs are disappearing and going to poorer nations.

Instead, all the good jobs of the future will require a very high education level.

Often teachers like me talk about skills for the 21 st Century . These are skills like:

• Creative thinking ;
• Critical thinking;
• Communication;
• Collaboration;
• Digital literacy

If children today aren’t educated on these important skills, they’ll have trouble finding the best jobs. And if a whole society falls behind in education, those good jobs will move overseas to where the most highly educated workers can be found.

20. Education can Prevent Wars and Conflicts

History lessons can be very powerful for helping is prevent the mistakes of the past.

If you want to avoid the mistakes of history, you have to learn about how they were made. By educating people about the events leading up to World War 1 and 2, we might be able to teach people how to avoid the same mistakes again.

Similarly, if a society is well educated on the dangers and heartbreak of wars, those wars might be prevented.

This happened during the Vietnam War when students on college campuses began protesting the war . These students worked hard to teach people all over the United States about what was really happening in Vietnam.

War journalists were also instrumental in educating the public on the terrible effects of the war. Video footage, photos and news reports sent back to the United States helped educate the population and helped boost the anti-war efforts.

21. Education is good for Democracy

Most first world nations ensure children are taught democratic citizenship .

Teaching the values of democratic societies – like the fact that we should elect our leaders – helps to keep democracy going.

If we don’t teach about how good democracy is for our freedom and prosperity, we may sleepwalk into an evil dictatorship!

Democracy is about more than voting. It’s about learning the importance of treating each other respectfully, volunteering in our community, and respecting each other’s liberty.

I think Senator Michael Bennet sums this one up well when he says in his blog post :

With education, the common man would be able to select leaders wisely and fight back against the tyrannical instincts of those in power.

22. Education leads to Medical and Technological Breakthroughs

Before we became obsessed with the link between education and money, societies still invested heavily in public universities.

Because strong higher education systems can lead to technological and medical breakthroughs.

Here’s a few things that people invented while learning and researching at universities:

• The Seat Belt: Invented at Cornell University
• Gatorade: Unvented at the University of Florida
• Ultrasound: Developed at the University of Vienna
• CAT Scans: Developed at Georgetown University
• GPS: Developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Polio Vaccine: Developed at the University of Pittsburgh

23. Education can lead to Entrepreneurship

The online website Talk Business argues that entrepreneurs are always in need of more education. They argue:

…at their core [Entrepreneurs] are problem solvers and spend their time investigating potential solutions.

In order to solve problems, entrepreneurs enroll themselves in courses, read books, listen to podcasts and pay for mentors. In other words, they’re huge self-educators.

The article goes on to explain that entrepreneurs often don’t seek out a formal education from a school or university. Instead, they seek out answers to their questions from people who have already solved the problems.

So, education is good for business – but don’t narrow your definition of education. Education can come in all shapes and sizes.

24. Education may be the Solution to Global Problems like Climate Change

There’s two ways education can help us get out of the problem of climate change.

Firstly, educating people about sustainability can help us to reduce our ecological footprint on this world. If we recycle more, consume less goods, and ensure we’re cleaning up after ourselves, we can do a lot to help the environment.

Secondly, educating future environmental scientists is vital for finding the solutions to our current environmental problems.

Scientists of the future might find ways to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, reduce the temperature of the globe, or come up with better ways to produce energy.

In the race against time to solve the climate crisis, education may just be the thing that saves us from ourselves.

25. Education is important for Creating a Cohesive Society

Education helps us learn how to behave appropriately.

Emile Durkheim is a major theorist who came up with this concept.

According to Durkheim, schooling is all about ‘socialization’.

By this, he means we go to school to learn about more than maths and science. School has a hidden curriculum . The hidden curriculum is all the things we learn above and beyond our textbooks.

The hidden curriculum includes:

• Learning manners;
• Learning to get along with each other;
• Learning to respect other people’s privacy;
• Learning to follow the rules for the good of society;
• and many more things besides!

So, without schools teaching us how to get along, there may be many more conflicts in our communities.

26. Education passes on Cultural Values, Heritage and Information from one Generation to the Next

How did you learn about Christmas? How about the 4 th of July? How did you learn about Native Americans?

We learn a lot of these things from school.

So, education also teaches us about our culture and who we are.

This usually takes place in history classes where we learn about the history of our nations and our world.

But we also learn cultural values from the hidden curriculum (If you haven’t read point 25, I talk about the hidden curriculum there).

For example, in western culture it’s polite to look people in the eyes and shake their hands. We also respect our elders. These are cultural values that are taught to us in everyday conversations at school.

27. Education can lead to Gender Equality

There is a lot of evidence that says education is the key to creating a more equal world.

For example, UNESCO states that women tend to be less educated than men in developing countries. However, women overall show more concern for the environment.

Why is this a problem?

Because at the moment women aren’t empowered enough (through education) to create change. More educated women means more power for women to effect change.

Here’s an example:

“Women constitute almost two-thirds of the 758 million adults who are unable to read or write a sentence – a vast pool of people we are not empowering to help us fight environmental shifts” ( UNESCO )

There is also the problem of gender stereotypes, which can be challenged through education . If we educate more people about justice and equality, gender stereotypes will diminish which will be good for gender equality.

Final Thoughts

Any importance of education speech or essay needs facts and figures backing it up. Use these 27 key points on the importance of education for your next essay!

You could also get facts from the following two sources:

• 23 Major Barriers to Education
• 11 Lifelong Effects of Lack of Education

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 5 Top Tips for Succeeding at University
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 50 Durable Goods Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 100 Consumer Goods Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 30 Globalization Pros and Cons

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Home — Essay Samples — Education — Importance of Education

Essays on Importance of Education

Hook examples for importance of education essays, anecdotal hook.

Imagine a world where knowledge is the currency of progress, where the pursuit of education opens doors to endless opportunities. As we embark on a journey to explore the profound significance of education, let's delve into the transformative power it holds.

Quotation Hook

""Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."" These words from Nelson Mandela underscore the transformative potential of education. Join me as we examine the impact of education on individuals and societies.

Educational Equality Hook

Access to quality education is a fundamental right. Explore the role of education in promoting equality, breaking down barriers, and addressing social disparities.

Empowerment Through Learning Hook

Education empowers individuals to take control of their lives and shape their destinies. Analyze how education equips people with the knowledge and skills to navigate challenges and make informed decisions.

Educational Innovation Hook

Education is not static; it evolves with the times. Delve into the world of educational innovation and explore how technology and new teaching methods are revolutionizing the learning experience.

Education for Global Citizenship Hook

Education is a bridge to global understanding and cooperation. Investigate how education fosters the development of global citizens who are aware of pressing global issues and actively engaged in solving them.

Lifelong Learning Hook

Learning doesn't end with graduation; it's a lifelong journey. Explore the concept of lifelong learning and how it contributes to personal growth, adaptability, and staying relevant in a rapidly changing world.

Benefits of Liberal Arts Education

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The Importance of Hegemony in Education

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My Views on Education and Its Importance

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Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, morals, beliefs, habits, and personal development.

Education originated as transmission of cultural heritage from one generation to the next. Today, educational goals increasingly encompass new ideas such as liberation of learners, critical thinking about presented information, skills needed for the modern society, empathy and complex vocational skills.

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Home  /  News  /  Why Is Education Important? The Power Of An Educated Society

Why Is Education Important? The Power Of An Educated Society

Looking for an answer to the question of why is education important? We address this query with a focus on how education can transform society through the way we interact with our environment. 

Whether you are a student, a parent, or someone who values educational attainment, you may be wondering how education can provide quality life to a society beyond the obvious answer of acquiring knowledge and economic growth. Continue reading as we discuss the importance of education not just for individuals but for society as a whole. 

Harness the power of education to build a more sustainable modern society with a degree from  Unity Environmental University .

How Education Is Power: The Importance Of Education In Society

Why is education so important? Nelson Mandela famously said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” An educated society is better equipped to tackle the challenges that face modern America, including:

• Climate change
• Social justice
• Economic inequality

Education is not just about learning to read and do math operations. Of course, gaining knowledge and practical skills is part of it, but education is also about values and critical thinking. It’s about finding our place in society in a meaningful way. 

Environmental Stewardship

A  study from 2022 found that people who belong to an environmental stewardship organization, such as the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics, are likely to have a higher education level than those who do not. This suggests that quality education can foster a sense of responsibility towards the environment.

With the effects of climate change becoming increasingly alarming, this particular importance of education is vital to the health, safety, and longevity of our society. Higher learning institutions can further encourage environmental stewardship by adopting a  framework of sustainability science .

The Economic Benefits Of Education

Higher education can lead to better job opportunities and higher income. On average, a  person with a bachelor’s degree will make $765,000 more  in their lifetime than someone with no degree. Even with the rising costs of tuition, investment in higher education pays off in the long run. In 2020, the return on investment (ROI) for a college degree was estimated to be  13.5% to 35.9% . 

Green jobs  like environmental science technicians and solar panel installers  have high demand projections for the next decade. Therefore, degrees that will prepare you for one of these careers will likely yield a high ROI. And, many of these jobs only require an  associate’s degree or certificate , which means lower overall education costs. 

Unity  helps students maximize their ROI with real-world experience in the field as an integral part of every degree program. 

10 Reasons Why School Is Important

Education is not just an individual pursuit but also a societal one.  In compiling these reasons, we focused on the question, “How does education benefit society?” Overall, higher education has the power to transform:

• Individuals’ sense of self
• Interpersonal relationships
• Social communities
• Professional communities

Cognitive Development

Neuroscience research  has proven that the brain is a muscle that can retain its neuroplasticity throughout life. However, like other muscles, it must receive continual exercise to remain strong. Higher education allows people of any age to improve their higher-level cognitive abilities like problem-solving and decision-making. This can make many parts of life feel more manageable and help society run smoothly. 

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is key to workplace success.  Studies  show that people with emotional intelligence exhibit more:

• Self-awareness
• Willingness to try new things
• Innovative thinking
• Active listening
• Collaboration skills
• Problem-solving abilities

By attending higher education institutions that value these soft skills, students can improve their emotional intelligence as part of their career development in college.

Technological Literacy

Many careers in today’s job market use advanced technology. To prepare for these jobs, young people likely won’t have access to these technologies to practice on their own. That’s part of why so many STEM career paths require degrees. It’s essential to gain technical knowledge and skills through a certified program to safely use certain technologies. And, educated scientists are  more likely to make new technological discoveries .

Cultural Awareness

Education exposes individuals to different cultures and perspectives. Being around people who are different has the powerful ability to foster acceptance. Acceptance benefits society as a whole. It increases innovation and empathy. 

College also gives students an opportunity to practice feeling comfortable in situations where there are people of different races, genders, sexualities, and abilities. Students can gain an understanding of how to act respectfully among different types of people, which is an important skill for the workplace. This will only become more vital as our world continues to become more globalized.

Ethical and Moral Development

Another reason why school is important is that it promotes ethical and moral development. Many schools require students to take an ethics course in their general education curriculum. However, schools can also encourage character development throughout their programs by using effective pedagogical strategies including:

• Class debates and discussions
• Historical case studies
• Group projects

Unity’s distance learning programs  include an ethical decision-making class in our core curriculum. 

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Communication Skills

Effective written and verbal communication skills are key for personal and professional success. Higher education programs usually include at least one communication course in their general education requirements. Often the focus in these classes is on writing skills, but students can also use college as an opportunity to hone their presentation and public speaking skills. Courses such as  Multimedia Communication for Environmental Professionals  provide many opportunities for this. 

Civic Engagement

According to a  Gallup survey , people with higher education degrees are:

• More likely to participate in civic activities such as voting and volunteering
• Less likely to commit crimes
• More likely to get involved in their local communities

All these individual acts add up to make a big difference in society. An educated electorate is less likely to be swayed by unethical politicians and, instead, make choices that benefit themselves and their community. Because they are more involved, they are also more likely to hold elected officials accountable.

Financial Stability

The right degree can significantly expand your career opportunities and improve your long-term earning potential. Not all degrees provide the same level of financial stability, so it’s important to research expected salary offers after graduation and job demand outlook predictions for your desired field. Consider the return on investment for a degree from an affordable private school such as  Unity Environmental University .

Environmental Awareness

We have already discussed why education is important for environmental stewardship. Education can also lead to better environmental practices in the business world. By building empathy through character education and ethics courses, institutions can train future business leaders to emphasize human rights and sustainability over profits. All types and sizes of businesses can incorporate sustainable practices, but awareness of the issues and solutions is the first step.

Lifelong Learning

The reasons why education is important discussed so far focus on institutional education. However, education can happen anywhere. Attending a university that values all kinds of learning will set students up with the foundation to become lifelong learners.  Research  demonstrates that lifelong learners tend to be healthier and more fulfilled throughout their lives. When societies emphasize the importance of education, they can boost their overall prosperity.

The Role Of Unity Environmental University In Society

Environmentally conscious education is extremely valuable and should be accessible to all.   Unity Environmental University  offers tuition prices that are comparable to public universities, and financial aid is available to those who qualify. Courses last five weeks so that students can focus on only one class at a time. This ensures all learners are set up for academic success. 

Unity believes in supporting students holistically to maximize the power of education. This includes mental health services,  experiential learning opportunities , and  job placement assistance . Students in our  hybrid programs  can take classes at several field stations throughout Maine and enjoy the beautiful nature surrounding the campus for outdoor recreation.

Sustainable Initiatives

Some highlights from Unity Environmental University’s many sustainable initiatives:

• All programs include at least one sustainability learning outcome
• All research courses are focused on sustainability research
• Reduced building energy use by 25% across campus
• 100% of food waste is recycled into energy 
• Campus features a  net-zero LEED Platinum-certified classroom/office building

While many schools value sustainability, Unity stands out because  everything  we do is about sustainability. We also recognize our responsibility to model how a sustainable business can operate in a manner that’s fiscally viable and socially responsible.

Make An Impact At Unity Environmental University

While the phrase ‘education is power’ may sound cliche, it is also resoundingly true. Higher education has the power to transform individuals and societies. Unity Environmental University understands its power to make a positive impact on the world. That’s why we were the first university to divest from fossil fuels. 

This year, we celebrated our  largest incoming class ever , showing that students want an education system that aligns with their values. In addition to our commitment to sustainability, we offer flexibility to students with start dates all year round for our  online degree programs .

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Importance Of Education Essay - 100, 200, 500 Words

Merriam - Webster defines “Education” as the knowledge and development resulting from the process of being educated. Education involves learning new skills and acquiring knowledge to have a better understanding of different disciplines. Here are a few sample essays on the importance of education.

• 100 Words Essay on The Importance of Education

Education is an important element in an individual's life to go ahead and find success . Parents, schools, and universities play a vital role in educating an individual. Education instils confidence, self-acceptance, and self-worth and makes a person more aware of their surroundings and issues faced by the world. In this competitive world, it is a must for an individual to be educated. Self-confidence is found more in an educated individual than in one who is uneducated. It helps people to improve their skills and work on better opportunities to make a living. Educated individuals are an asset to the nation and help a nation to grow.

200 Words Essay on The Importance of Education

500 words essay on the importance of education.

Education brings change and it helps an individual to understand their rights and responsibilities towards their family, society, nation, and world. It helps an individual to view the world and situation from a different perspective and fight against violence, injustice, corruption, and various other mishappenings. It makes a person more stable and wise. One can improve their chance of getting job opportunities with the aid of their expertise and degree. It opens several opportunities in various fields for an individual.

Education teaches a person to be self-sufficient. It brings equality to society. If everyone chooses to be educated, there will be equality among individuals and no one will look down on others with disrespect. Education makes a person productive and helps them to contribute to society efficiently. An educated person is an asset to society as well as the nation . It can be said that education is a staircase for a person's, society's, and nation's achievement and development. The future of a nation is dependent on the education of the present generation. It plays a significant influence in making and developing us, making us more optimistic about life and its objectives. An educated person tends to live a more meaningful and purposeful life than an uneducated individual.

Franz Grillparzer once said, “The uneducated person perceives only the individual phenomenon, the partly educated person the rule, and the educated person the exception". Education is necessary for individuals. It is one of the basic rights of an individual. It expedites quality learning and also inculcates belief, skills, knowledge, value, and moral habits. Education makes an individual’s life better and more peaceful. The first step of education is to teach an individual to write and read. Education makes people aware and literate. It opens the door to employment and certainly helps people to make a better living. It also improves and refines the communication skills of a person. It educates an individual to use the resources available to them pragmatically. One of the noteworthy aspects of education is its importance in spreading knowledge in society. The knowledge is passed from one generation to another when a person is educated. It is not one person who is educated but through one many are educated. It is a ray of light and hope for a better life.

Personality Development

Education makes a person socially, mentally, and intellectually strong as it increases knowledge level, and improves technical skills . It helps them to secure a better position in the corporate and educational sectors. It is a tool that benefits throughout life. Education plays an important role in the modern technological world. Education is not tough and costly like in earlier days when only rich people could afford to get their children educated and trained. There are many ways to enhance the education level in the present century. The whole criteria of getting educated have changed in this modernised era.

Education is now accessible to an individual of any age group. It is said that it is better late than never. Age limit can never be a barrier if the mind of a person is not limited. Schools have opened a curriculum in which a person can undergo homeschooling. Various distance learning programs are opened by Universities all over the world. We can study through the means of distance learning programs after high school while pursuing a job. The academic fee has also been made feasible to make the courses accessible for every individual.

Non-Governmental Organisations and Governmental organisations run various drives in which they come to an area and teach students . Parents and teachers play an important role in an individual’s life to help them to become well-educated people. It develops people's minds and removes a great barrier in society. It makes people noble and perfect. It enhances personal advancements, increases social health and progress, and economical progress.

Educated individuals are the asset of any nation . Through them, a nation advances as education removes the barrier of mindsets, provides knowledge and information, and makes a person a good listener and well-mannered. It provides an individual with a unique standard in life and prepares them to solve any family, social, national, and international level problems. Education helps in financial and mental stability and self–dependency. It instals confidence in a person which is one of the finest aspects of success and also boosts self–assurance.

Explore Career Options (By Industry)

• Construction
• Entertainment
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• Information Technology

Data Administrator

Database professionals use software to store and organise data such as financial information, and customer shipping records. Individuals who opt for a career as data administrators ensure that data is available for users and secured from unauthorised sales. DB administrators may work in various types of industries. It may involve computer systems design, service firms, insurance companies, banks and hospitals.

Bio Medical Engineer

The field of biomedical engineering opens up a universe of expert chances. An Individual in the biomedical engineering career path work in the field of engineering as well as medicine, in order to find out solutions to common problems of the two fields. The biomedical engineering job opportunities are to collaborate with doctors and researchers to develop medical systems, equipment, or devices that can solve clinical problems. Here we will be discussing jobs after biomedical engineering, how to get a job in biomedical engineering, biomedical engineering scope, and salary. 

Ethical Hacker

A career as ethical hacker involves various challenges and provides lucrative opportunities in the digital era where every giant business and startup owns its cyberspace on the world wide web. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path try to find the vulnerabilities in the cyber system to get its authority. If he or she succeeds in it then he or she gets its illegal authority. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path then steal information or delete the file that could affect the business, functioning, or services of the organization.

GIS officer work on various GIS software to conduct a study and gather spatial and non-spatial information. GIS experts update the GIS data and maintain it. The databases include aerial or satellite imagery, latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, and manually digitized images of maps. In a career as GIS expert, one is responsible for creating online and mobile maps.

Data Analyst

The invention of the database has given fresh breath to the people involved in the data analytics career path. Analysis refers to splitting up a whole into its individual components for individual analysis. Data analysis is a method through which raw data are processed and transformed into information that would be beneficial for user strategic thinking.

Data are collected and examined to respond to questions, evaluate hypotheses or contradict theories. It is a tool for analyzing, transforming, modeling, and arranging data with useful knowledge, to assist in decision-making and methods, encompassing various strategies, and is used in different fields of business, research, and social science.

Geothermal Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as geothermal engineers are the professionals involved in the processing of geothermal energy. The responsibilities of geothermal engineers may vary depending on the workplace location. Those who work in fields design facilities to process and distribute geothermal energy. They oversee the functioning of machinery used in the field.

Database Architect

If you are intrigued by the programming world and are interested in developing communications networks then a career as database architect may be a good option for you. Data architect roles and responsibilities include building design models for data communication networks. Wide Area Networks (WANs), local area networks (LANs), and intranets are included in the database networks. It is expected that database architects will have in-depth knowledge of a company's business to develop a network to fulfil the requirements of the organisation. Stay tuned as we look at the larger picture and give you more information on what is db architecture, why you should pursue database architecture, what to expect from such a degree and what your job opportunities will be after graduation. Here, we will be discussing how to become a data architect. Students can visit NIT Trichy , IIT Kharagpur , JMI New Delhi . 

Remote Sensing Technician

Individuals who opt for a career as a remote sensing technician possess unique personalities. Remote sensing analysts seem to be rational human beings, they are strong, independent, persistent, sincere, realistic and resourceful. Some of them are analytical as well, which means they are intelligent, introspective and inquisitive. 

Remote sensing scientists use remote sensing technology to support scientists in fields such as community planning, flight planning or the management of natural resources. Analysing data collected from aircraft, satellites or ground-based platforms using statistical analysis software, image analysis software or Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a significant part of their work. Do you want to learn how to become remote sensing technician? There's no need to be concerned; we've devised a simple remote sensing technician career path for you. Scroll through the pages and read.

Budget Analyst

Budget analysis, in a nutshell, entails thoroughly analyzing the details of a financial budget. The budget analysis aims to better understand and manage revenue. Budget analysts assist in the achievement of financial targets, the preservation of profitability, and the pursuit of long-term growth for a business. Budget analysts generally have a bachelor's degree in accounting, finance, economics, or a closely related field. Knowledge of Financial Management is of prime importance in this career.

Underwriter

An underwriter is a person who assesses and evaluates the risk of insurance in his or her field like mortgage, loan, health policy, investment, and so on and so forth. The underwriter career path does involve risks as analysing the risks means finding out if there is a way for the insurance underwriter jobs to recover the money from its clients. If the risk turns out to be too much for the company then in the future it is an underwriter who will be held accountable for it. Therefore, one must carry out his or her job with a lot of attention and diligence.

Finance Executive

Product manager.

A Product Manager is a professional responsible for product planning and marketing. He or she manages the product throughout the Product Life Cycle, gathering and prioritising the product. A product manager job description includes defining the product vision and working closely with team members of other departments to deliver winning products.  

Operations Manager

Individuals in the operations manager jobs are responsible for ensuring the efficiency of each department to acquire its optimal goal. They plan the use of resources and distribution of materials. The operations manager's job description includes managing budgets, negotiating contracts, and performing administrative tasks.

Stock Analyst

Individuals who opt for a career as a stock analyst examine the company's investments makes decisions and keep track of financial securities. The nature of such investments will differ from one business to the next. Individuals in the stock analyst career use data mining to forecast a company's profits and revenues, advise clients on whether to buy or sell, participate in seminars, and discussing financial matters with executives and evaluate annual reports.

A Researcher is a professional who is responsible for collecting data and information by reviewing the literature and conducting experiments and surveys. He or she uses various methodological processes to provide accurate data and information that is utilised by academicians and other industry professionals. Here, we will discuss what is a researcher, the researcher's salary, types of researchers.

Welding Engineer

Welding Engineer Job Description: A Welding Engineer work involves managing welding projects and supervising welding teams. He or she is responsible for reviewing welding procedures, processes and documentation. A career as Welding Engineer involves conducting failure analyses and causes on welding issues. 

Transportation Planner

A career as Transportation Planner requires technical application of science and technology in engineering, particularly the concepts, equipment and technologies involved in the production of products and services. In fields like land use, infrastructure review, ecological standards and street design, he or she considers issues of health, environment and performance. A Transportation Planner assigns resources for implementing and designing programmes. He or she is responsible for assessing needs, preparing plans and forecasts and compliance with regulations.

Environmental Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as an environmental engineer are construction professionals who utilise the skills and knowledge of biology, soil science, chemistry and the concept of engineering to design and develop projects that serve as solutions to various environmental problems. 

Safety Manager

A Safety Manager is a professional responsible for employee’s safety at work. He or she plans, implements and oversees the company’s employee safety. A Safety Manager ensures compliance and adherence to Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) guidelines.

Conservation Architect

A Conservation Architect is a professional responsible for conserving and restoring buildings or monuments having a historic value. He or she applies techniques to document and stabilise the object’s state without any further damage. A Conservation Architect restores the monuments and heritage buildings to bring them back to their original state.

Structural Engineer

A Structural Engineer designs buildings, bridges, and other related structures. He or she analyzes the structures and makes sure the structures are strong enough to be used by the people. A career as a Structural Engineer requires working in the construction process. It comes under the civil engineering discipline. A Structure Engineer creates structural models with the help of computer-aided design software. 

Highway Engineer

Highway Engineer Job Description:  A Highway Engineer is a civil engineer who specialises in planning and building thousands of miles of roads that support connectivity and allow transportation across the country. He or she ensures that traffic management schemes are effectively planned concerning economic sustainability and successful implementation.

Field Surveyor

Are you searching for a Field Surveyor Job Description? A Field Surveyor is a professional responsible for conducting field surveys for various places or geographical conditions. He or she collects the required data and information as per the instructions given by senior officials. 

Orthotist and Prosthetist

Orthotists and Prosthetists are professionals who provide aid to patients with disabilities. They fix them to artificial limbs (prosthetics) and help them to regain stability. There are times when people lose their limbs in an accident. In some other occasions, they are born without a limb or orthopaedic impairment. Orthotists and prosthetists play a crucial role in their lives with fixing them to assistive devices and provide mobility.

Pathologist

A career in pathology in India is filled with several responsibilities as it is a medical branch and affects human lives. The demand for pathologists has been increasing over the past few years as people are getting more aware of different diseases. Not only that, but an increase in population and lifestyle changes have also contributed to the increase in a pathologist’s demand. The pathology careers provide an extremely huge number of opportunities and if you want to be a part of the medical field you can consider being a pathologist. If you want to know more about a career in pathology in India then continue reading this article.

Veterinary Doctor

Speech therapist, gynaecologist.

Gynaecology can be defined as the study of the female body. The job outlook for gynaecology is excellent since there is evergreen demand for one because of their responsibility of dealing with not only women’s health but also fertility and pregnancy issues. Although most women prefer to have a women obstetrician gynaecologist as their doctor, men also explore a career as a gynaecologist and there are ample amounts of male doctors in the field who are gynaecologists and aid women during delivery and childbirth. 

Audiologist

The audiologist career involves audiology professionals who are responsible to treat hearing loss and proactively preventing the relevant damage. Individuals who opt for a career as an audiologist use various testing strategies with the aim to determine if someone has a normal sensitivity to sounds or not. After the identification of hearing loss, a hearing doctor is required to determine which sections of the hearing are affected, to what extent they are affected, and where the wound causing the hearing loss is found. As soon as the hearing loss is identified, the patients are provided with recommendations for interventions and rehabilitation such as hearing aids, cochlear implants, and appropriate medical referrals. While audiology is a branch of science that studies and researches hearing, balance, and related disorders.

An oncologist is a specialised doctor responsible for providing medical care to patients diagnosed with cancer. He or she uses several therapies to control the cancer and its effect on the human body such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy and biopsy. An oncologist designs a treatment plan based on a pathology report after diagnosing the type of cancer and where it is spreading inside the body.

Are you searching for an ‘Anatomist job description’? An Anatomist is a research professional who applies the laws of biological science to determine the ability of bodies of various living organisms including animals and humans to regenerate the damaged or destroyed organs. If you want to know what does an anatomist do, then read the entire article, where we will answer all your questions.

For an individual who opts for a career as an actor, the primary responsibility is to completely speak to the character he or she is playing and to persuade the crowd that the character is genuine by connecting with them and bringing them into the story. This applies to significant roles and littler parts, as all roles join to make an effective creation. Here in this article, we will discuss how to become an actor in India, actor exams, actor salary in India, and actor jobs. 

Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats create and direct original routines for themselves, in addition to developing interpretations of existing routines. The work of circus acrobats can be seen in a variety of performance settings, including circus, reality shows, sports events like the Olympics, movies and commercials. Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats must be prepared to face rejections and intermittent periods of work. The creativity of acrobats may extend to other aspects of the performance. For example, acrobats in the circus may work with gym trainers, celebrities or collaborate with other professionals to enhance such performance elements as costume and or maybe at the teaching end of the career.

Video Game Designer

Career as a video game designer is filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. A video game designer is someone who is involved in the process of creating a game from day one. He or she is responsible for fulfilling duties like designing the character of the game, the several levels involved, plot, art and similar other elements. Individuals who opt for a career as a video game designer may also write the codes for the game using different programming languages.

Depending on the video game designer job description and experience they may also have to lead a team and do the early testing of the game in order to suggest changes and find loopholes.

Radio Jockey

Radio Jockey is an exciting, promising career and a great challenge for music lovers. If you are really interested in a career as radio jockey, then it is very important for an RJ to have an automatic, fun, and friendly personality. If you want to get a job done in this field, a strong command of the language and a good voice are always good things. Apart from this, in order to be a good radio jockey, you will also listen to good radio jockeys so that you can understand their style and later make your own by practicing.

A career as radio jockey has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. If you want to know more about a career as radio jockey, and how to become a radio jockey then continue reading the article.

Choreographer

The word “choreography" actually comes from Greek words that mean “dance writing." Individuals who opt for a career as a choreographer create and direct original dances, in addition to developing interpretations of existing dances. A Choreographer dances and utilises his or her creativity in other aspects of dance performance. For example, he or she may work with the music director to select music or collaborate with other famous choreographers to enhance such performance elements as lighting, costume and set design.

Social Media Manager

A career as social media manager involves implementing the company’s or brand’s marketing plan across all social media channels. Social media managers help in building or improving a brand’s or a company’s website traffic, build brand awareness, create and implement marketing and brand strategy. Social media managers are key to important social communication as well.

Photographer

Photography is considered both a science and an art, an artistic means of expression in which the camera replaces the pen. In a career as a photographer, an individual is hired to capture the moments of public and private events, such as press conferences or weddings, or may also work inside a studio, where people go to get their picture clicked. Photography is divided into many streams each generating numerous career opportunities in photography. With the boom in advertising, media, and the fashion industry, photography has emerged as a lucrative and thrilling career option for many Indian youths.

An individual who is pursuing a career as a producer is responsible for managing the business aspects of production. They are involved in each aspect of production from its inception to deception. Famous movie producers review the script, recommend changes and visualise the story. 

They are responsible for overseeing the finance involved in the project and distributing the film for broadcasting on various platforms. A career as a producer is quite fulfilling as well as exhaustive in terms of playing different roles in order for a production to be successful. Famous movie producers are responsible for hiring creative and technical personnel on contract basis.

Copy Writer

In a career as a copywriter, one has to consult with the client and understand the brief well. A career as a copywriter has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. Several new mediums of advertising are opening therefore making it a lucrative career choice. Students can pursue various copywriter courses such as Journalism , Advertising , Marketing Management . Here, we have discussed how to become a freelance copywriter, copywriter career path, how to become a copywriter in India, and copywriting career outlook. 

In a career as a vlogger, one generally works for himself or herself. However, once an individual has gained viewership there are several brands and companies that approach them for paid collaboration. It is one of those fields where an individual can earn well while following his or her passion. 

Ever since internet costs got reduced the viewership for these types of content has increased on a large scale. Therefore, a career as a vlogger has a lot to offer. If you want to know more about the Vlogger eligibility, roles and responsibilities then continue reading the article. 

For publishing books, newspapers, magazines and digital material, editorial and commercial strategies are set by publishers. Individuals in publishing career paths make choices about the markets their businesses will reach and the type of content that their audience will be served. Individuals in book publisher careers collaborate with editorial staff, designers, authors, and freelance contributors who develop and manage the creation of content.

Careers in journalism are filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. One cannot afford to miss out on the details. As it is the small details that provide insights into a story. Depending on those insights a journalist goes about writing a news article. A journalism career can be stressful at times but if you are someone who is passionate about it then it is the right choice for you. If you want to know more about the media field and journalist career then continue reading this article.

Individuals in the editor career path is an unsung hero of the news industry who polishes the language of the news stories provided by stringers, reporters, copywriters and content writers and also news agencies. Individuals who opt for a career as an editor make it more persuasive, concise and clear for readers. In this article, we will discuss the details of the editor's career path such as how to become an editor in India, editor salary in India and editor skills and qualities.

Individuals who opt for a career as a reporter may often be at work on national holidays and festivities. He or she pitches various story ideas and covers news stories in risky situations. Students can pursue a BMC (Bachelor of Mass Communication) , B.M.M. (Bachelor of Mass Media) , or  MAJMC (MA in Journalism and Mass Communication) to become a reporter. While we sit at home reporters travel to locations to collect information that carries a news value.  

Corporate Executive

Are you searching for a Corporate Executive job description? A Corporate Executive role comes with administrative duties. He or she provides support to the leadership of the organisation. A Corporate Executive fulfils the business purpose and ensures its financial stability. In this article, we are going to discuss how to become corporate executive.

Multimedia Specialist

A multimedia specialist is a media professional who creates, audio, videos, graphic image files, computer animations for multimedia applications. He or she is responsible for planning, producing, and maintaining websites and applications. 

Quality Controller

A quality controller plays a crucial role in an organisation. He or she is responsible for performing quality checks on manufactured products. He or she identifies the defects in a product and rejects the product. 

A quality controller records detailed information about products with defects and sends it to the supervisor or plant manager to take necessary actions to improve the production process.

Production Manager

A QA Lead is in charge of the QA Team. The role of QA Lead comes with the responsibility of assessing services and products in order to determine that he or she meets the quality standards. He or she develops, implements and manages test plans. 

Process Development Engineer

The Process Development Engineers design, implement, manufacture, mine, and other production systems using technical knowledge and expertise in the industry. They use computer modeling software to test technologies and machinery. An individual who is opting career as Process Development Engineer is responsible for developing cost-effective and efficient processes. They also monitor the production process and ensure it functions smoothly and efficiently.

AWS Solution Architect

An AWS Solution Architect is someone who specializes in developing and implementing cloud computing systems. He or she has a good understanding of the various aspects of cloud computing and can confidently deploy and manage their systems. He or she troubleshoots the issues and evaluates the risk from the third party. 

Azure Administrator

An Azure Administrator is a professional responsible for implementing, monitoring, and maintaining Azure Solutions. He or she manages cloud infrastructure service instances and various cloud servers as well as sets up public and private cloud systems. 

Computer Programmer

Careers in computer programming primarily refer to the systematic act of writing code and moreover include wider computer science areas. The word 'programmer' or 'coder' has entered into practice with the growing number of newly self-taught tech enthusiasts. Computer programming careers involve the use of designs created by software developers and engineers and transforming them into commands that can be implemented by computers. These commands result in regular usage of social media sites, word-processing applications and browsers.

Information Security Manager

Individuals in the information security manager career path involves in overseeing and controlling all aspects of computer security. The IT security manager job description includes planning and carrying out security measures to protect the business data and information from corruption, theft, unauthorised access, and deliberate attack 

ITSM Manager

Automation test engineer.

An Automation Test Engineer job involves executing automated test scripts. He or she identifies the project’s problems and troubleshoots them. The role involves documenting the defect using management tools. He or she works with the application team in order to resolve any issues arising during the testing process. 

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Essay on Education for School Students and Children

500+ words essay on education.

Education is an important tool which is very useful in everybody’s life. Education is what differentiates us from other living beings on earth. It makes man the smartest creature on earth. It empowers humans and gets them ready to face challenges of life efficiently. With that being said, education still remains a luxury and not a necessity in our country. Educational awareness needs to be spread through the country to make education accessible. But, this remains incomplete without first analyzing the importance of education. Only when the people realize what significance it holds, can they consider it a necessity for a good life. In this essay on Education, we will see the importance of education and how it is a doorway to success.

Importance of Education

Education is the most significant tool in eliminating poverty and unemployment . Moreover, it enhances the commercial scenario and benefits the country overall. So, the higher the level of education in a country, the better the chances of development are.

In addition, this education also benefits an individual in various ways. It helps a person take a better and informed decision with the use of their knowledge. This increases the success rate of a person in life.

Subsequently, education is also responsible for providing with an enhanced lifestyle. It gives you career opportunities that can increase your quality of life.

Similarly, education also helps in making a person independent. When one is educated enough, they won’t have to depend on anyone else for their livelihood. They will be self-sufficient to earn for themselves and lead a good life.

Above all, education also enhances the self-confidence of a person and makes them certain of things in life. When we talk from the countries viewpoint, even then education plays a significant role. Educated people vote for the better candidate of the country. This ensures the development and growth of a nation.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Doorway to Success

To say that education is your doorway to success would be an understatement. It serves as the key which will unlock numerous doors that will lead to success. This will, in turn, help you build a better life for yourself.

An educated person has a lot of job opportunities waiting for them on the other side of the door. They can choose from a variety of options and not be obligated to do something they dislike. Most importantly, education impacts our perception positively. It helps us choose the right path and look at things from various viewpoints rather than just one.

With education, you can enhance your productivity and complete a task better in comparison to an uneducated person. However, one must always ensure that education solely does not ensure success.

It is a doorway to success which requires hard work, dedication and more after which can you open it successfully. All of these things together will make you successful in life.

In conclusion, education makes you a better person and teaches you various skills. It enhances your intellect and the ability to make rational decisions. It enhances the individual growth of a person.

Education also improves the economic growth of a country . Above all, it aids in building a better society for the citizens of a country. It helps to destroy the darkness of ignorance and bring light to the world.

FAQs on Education

Q.1 Why is Education Important?

A.1 Education is important because it is responsible for the overall development of a person. It helps you acquire skills which are necessary for becoming successful in life.

Q.2 How does Education serve as a Doorway to Success?

A.2 Education is a doorway to success because it offers you job opportunities. Furthermore, it changes our perception of life and makes it better.

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Top 10 Reasons Why Is Education Important

Updated: February 1, 2024

Published: April 15, 2020

Most of us have grown up being taught the importance of education. But why is education important? Through your frustrating school years, you may have thought that it was a waste of time, or was just something that you needed to do in order to get a job. Truth be told, however, education goes so much beyond just getting a job and making your parents happy. In fact, it’s one of the most powerful tools out there.

What Is Education?

Education means studying in order to obtain a deeper knowledge and understanding of a variety of subjects to be applied to daily life. Education is not limited to just knowledge from books, but can also be obtained through practical experiences outside of the classroom.

Top 10 Reasons: Why Is Education Important?

There are many different understandings and definitions of what education is, but one thing can be universally agreed upon, which is the importance of education — and here’s why.

1. Provides Stability

Education provides stability in life, and it’s something that no one can ever take away from you. By being well-educated and holding a college degree , you increase your chances for better career opportunities and open up new doors for yourself.

2. Provides Financial Security

On top of stability, education also provides financial security, especially in today’s society. A good education tends to lead to a higher paying job, as well as provide you with the skills needed to get there. Educated and well-informed individuals also know how to use money-saving tactics. They are more likely to use coupon websites like EMUCoupon while shopping online to save their hard-earned money.

3. Needed For Equality

In order for the entire world to really become equal, it needs to start with education. If everyone was provided with the same opportunities to education , then there would be less gaps between social classes. Everyone would be able to have an equal chance at higher paying jobs — not just those that are already well-off.

4. Allows For Self-Dependency

The importance of education is evident when it comes to being self-dependent. If we are we educated, then it’s something that belongs to us, and only us, allowing us to rely on no one else other than ourselves. It can allow you to not only be financially independent, but also to make your own choices.

5. Make Your Dreams Come True

If you can dream it, you can achieve it. An education is the most powerful weapon you can possibly have, and with it, you can make all of your dreams come true. There are of course certain exceptions, depending on what you’re aiming for, but generally an education will take you as far as you’re willing to go.

6. A Safer World

Education is something that’s not only needed on a personal level, but also on a global level, as it’s something that keeps our world safe and makes it a more peaceful place. Education tends to teach people the difference between right and wrong, and can help people stay out of risky situations.

7. Confidence

Being self-confident is a major part of being successful in life. And what better way to gain that confidence than with an education? Your level of education is often considered a way to prove your knowledge, and it can give you the confidence to express your opinions and speak your mind.

8. A Part Of Society

In today’s society, having an education is considered a vital part of being accepted by those around you. Having an education is believed to make you a useful part of society, and can make you feel like a contributing member as well.

9. Economic Growth On A National Level

An educated society is crucial for economic growth. We need people to continue to learn and research in order to constantly stay innovative. Countries with higher literacy rates also tend to be in better economic situations. With a more educated population, more employment opportunities are opened.

10. Can Protect You

Education can protect you more than you know, not only on a financial level, but it can help prevent you from being taken advantage of by knowing how to read and write, such as knowing not to sign any bogus documents.

Photo by  Pixabay  from  Pexels

Education is important for children.

Children are the future of our world, making education crucial for them. Their knowledge is what’s going to keep our world alive and flourishing.

At Childhood

During the childhood development stages, the importance of education is stronger than ever. It’s a time for children to learn social and mental skills that will be crucial for their growth and success in the future. Education at childhood also offers a chance for self-discovery and to learn about their unique interests.

The importance of education in our lives goes far beyond what we can read in a textbook. Education also provides childhood with knowledge such as how to produce artwork and make music. Education allows us to analyze what’s in front of us, and even learn from our mistakes.

Goal Building

By learning from a young age, children are given the chance to start building goals for themselves. Education means having the logic to set your mind to something and achieve it.

Importance Of Education In Society

For a modern society, education is of utmost importance. There are so many influences coming from all directions, and education can help us decipher what we should take as true, and what we should take with a grain of salt. Education can mold people into functional members of society with the right kinds of values.

Productivity

Education is needed for a productive society. Our population only continues to increase, and in turn, so do our needs. We need a strong and efficient workforce of educated people to provide us with the services we need for everyday life.

Why Is Education Important For a Nation?

The importance of education is seen in every aspect of life, and is especially crucial for the growth of a nation.

The Impact Education Has On The World

With education, people can become better citizens, knowing right from wrong, allowing for a better society where laws are followed. An educated nation knows about the importance of voting, doing so with the knowledge not blindly, but also having an understanding of what their party truly stands for. Education can also help people get jobs, which is what a nation thrives on.

Inspiring Quotes On What Education Truly Is

Why is education important, and what is it exactly? While every person has a different understanding of its true meaning, here are some of the most inspiring quotes by some legendary people.

• “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” — Nelson Mandela
• “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” — Malcolm X
• “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” — Benjamin Franklin
• “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” — John Dewey

What Are Some Other Reasons Why Education Is Important?

There are endless reasons why education is so important, especially since it also has endless connotations and meanings.

Mind And Body

Our mind and bodies are connected more than we know. With a powerful, well-educated mind, so too are our bodies.

We can not only know how to best take care of ourselves, but we can feel confident and good about ourselves, which will likely have a positive effect on our physical well-being . Education has even been proven to add years to our life . To be exact, each additional year of education was found to add as much as 1.7 years to our lives at the age of 35.

Personal Growth

The importance of education even extends itself to our personal growth. By constantly educating ourselves, asking questions and wanting to know more, we can move forward and achieve things we never imagined before.

Get To Know Yourself

Education can allow us to get to know ourselves better than ever. We can learn things about ourselves, whether it be through books, courses, or even consulting with a professional.

Photo by  Burst  from  Pexels

Worldwide value.

Education is the best way to ensure a positive world value and view. Without a proper education, how else do we know what’s considered appropriate and how to behave?

While world peace may unfortunately seem like a far-fetched concept, with education we can get closer to this goal than we know. Education can teach us about our place in this world, and about our responsibility to humanity.

Teaches Values

Values are taught through education! Education exists far beyond the classroom or an exam. It’s taught at home, through what our parents and peers show us, and although not necessarily written down somewhere, such a teaching method is still a large aspect of what education entails.

Sharpens Your Thinking

Education is needed to think sharply and clearly!

Makes You Informed

Education makes you informed about the world around you, what’s going on and what kind of people are around you. Education can help you be more self-aware about your strengths and weaknesses, showing you were to shift your focus.

Logical Reasoning

When in an argument, if you aren’t well educated and don’t have your facts straight, then you aren’t likely to win. If you get upset about something, then being educated can also help you logically work through the situation and make sense of it, understanding all aspects.

Stay Focused

Education can help you stay focused and on track in the right direction by knowing what the right path is for you.

Allows For Innovation And Creativity

When it comes to being creative, in any way, shape, or form, the mind can only really reach its full potential if it’s been fed with the knowledge it needs to think outside the box.

Develop Life Skills

Education is the foundation of basic life skills and street smarts. While education might sound like a fancy technical term, it’s really everything we learn in life about how to best conduct ourselves from day to day.

Education can be the most freeing and empowering thing in the entire world!

Live Life To The Fullest

Truly living life to the fullest means being well-educated and holding a vast amount of knowledge about the world around us. It also means we continue to learn every day in all kinds of forms, whether it be from the people around us, newspapers, experiences, research, or traditional classes.

Breaks Barriers

Education breaks barriers between people, and allows people from across the globe to be empowered.

University of the People, a tuition-free , online university, is one powerful example of how education is being revolutionized – they offer students of all socio-economic backgrounds an equal chance at education.

Once upon a time, such a thing wouldn’t have been possible, but today such places like UoPeople have proven that these barriers truly can be broken through to receive higher education.

You Become Your Highest You

Education can allow you to become the best, fullest version of yourself, learning about what interests you, what you’re good at, becoming self-aware and conscious about the world around you. It can help you establish your place in this world, and feel complete.

Education In The Modern World

Education today is more important than ever before, and has reached new heights with new understandings of what it truly entails. Ask yourself “Why is education important?” and it will surely not be the same as anyone else’s answer.

While in modern society, holding a college degree is considered to be highly beneficial for a successful career and to be socially accepted, it is not the only means of education. Education is all around us in everything that we do, so use it wisely!

Related Articles

Frederick Douglass : the Importance of Education and Literacy

This essay about Frederick Douglass explores his profound impact on American history, emphasizing his unwavering belief in education and literacy as tools for liberation. It highlights Douglass’s from slavery to enlightenment, his advocacy for universal education, and his enduring legacy as a champion of freedom and equality. Through eloquent prose, it underscores the transformative power of education in shaping both individuals and societies, echoing Douglass’s timeless message of liberation through literacy.

How it works

In the vibrant mosaic of American history, one figure gleams with a luminosity all its own—Frederick Douglass. Born into the crucible of slavery in 1818, Douglass left an indelible mark on the narrative of liberation, fueled by an unwavering faith in the alchemy of education and literacy. His odyssey from bondage to enlightenment stands as a dazzling testament to the profound impact of learning in emancipating both individuals and societies from the chains of ignorance.

Douglass grasped early on that education was not merely about the accumulation of knowledge; it was the key to unlocking the mind’s liberation.

Denied the basic right to literacy, he recognized the pivotal role it played in dismantling the shackles of oppression. Despite the draconian prohibitions placed upon enslaved minds, Douglass embarked on a clandestine voyage of self-discovery, stealthily imbibing the forbidden fruits of knowledge. In the dim glow of secrecy, he voraciously consumed books and parchments, carving out his own path from bondage to enlightenment.

The contours of Douglass’s journey were etched by the lines of his own narrative, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.” In this seminal work, he not only laid bare the horrors of slavery but also illuminated the transformative power of literacy in his personal emancipation. Through the written word, Douglass transcended the confines of his circumstances, giving voice to the unquenchable human longing for freedom and dignity.

Yet, for Douglass, education was not solely a means of personal liberation; it was the cornerstone of societal progress. Armed with the weapon of literacy, he wielded his words as a mighty hammer against the fortress of slavery, delivering impassioned speeches and incisive writings that reverberated across the antebellum landscape. His eloquence was not mere rhetoric but a clarion call to action, stirring a nation to confront the moral abomination of slavery.

Douglass understood that the pursuit of freedom extended beyond the confines of slavery to the corridors of power. In the wake of emancipation, he became a fervent advocate for universal public education, recognizing that an enlightened citizenry was essential for the preservation of democracy. His vision of education encompassed not just the classroom but a lifelong commitment to learning and intellectual inquiry.

In the pantheon of American heroes, Frederick Douglass occupies a place of honor, his legacy enduring as a beacon of hope and inspiration for generations to come. His life exemplifies the enduring power of education and literacy to emancipate minds and uplift souls. As we navigate the challenges of our time, let us heed Douglass’s call to harness the transformative power of education to build a more just and equitable society. For in Douglass’s own immortal words, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

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Frederick Douglass : The Importance Of Education And Literacy. (2024, Apr 29). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/frederick-douglass-the-importance-of-education-and-literacy/

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Conclusions

What this handout is about.

This handout will explain the functions of conclusions, offer strategies for writing effective ones, help you evaluate conclusions you’ve drafted, and suggest approaches to avoid.

About conclusions

Introductions and conclusions can be difficult to write, but they’re worth investing time in. They can have a significant influence on a reader’s experience of your paper.

Just as your introduction acts as a bridge that transports your readers from their own lives into the “place” of your analysis, your conclusion can provide a bridge to help your readers make the transition back to their daily lives. Such a conclusion will help them see why all your analysis and information should matter to them after they put the paper down.

Your conclusion is your chance to have the last word on the subject. The conclusion allows you to have the final say on the issues you have raised in your paper, to synthesize your thoughts, to demonstrate the importance of your ideas, and to propel your reader to a new view of the subject. It is also your opportunity to make a good final impression and to end on a positive note.

Your conclusion can go beyond the confines of the assignment. The conclusion pushes beyond the boundaries of the prompt and allows you to consider broader issues, make new connections, and elaborate on the significance of your findings.

Your conclusion should make your readers glad they read your paper. Your conclusion gives your reader something to take away that will help them see things differently or appreciate your topic in personally relevant ways. It can suggest broader implications that will not only interest your reader, but also enrich your reader’s life in some way. It is your gift to the reader.

Strategies for writing an effective conclusion

One or more of the following strategies may help you write an effective conclusion:

• Play the “So What” Game. If you’re stuck and feel like your conclusion isn’t saying anything new or interesting, ask a friend to read it with you. Whenever you make a statement from your conclusion, ask the friend to say, “So what?” or “Why should anybody care?” Then ponder that question and answer it. Here’s how it might go: You: Basically, I’m just saying that education was important to Douglass. Friend: So what? You: Well, it was important because it was a key to him feeling like a free and equal citizen. Friend: Why should anybody care? You: That’s important because plantation owners tried to keep slaves from being educated so that they could maintain control. When Douglass obtained an education, he undermined that control personally. You can also use this strategy on your own, asking yourself “So What?” as you develop your ideas or your draft.
• Return to the theme or themes in the introduction. This strategy brings the reader full circle. For example, if you begin by describing a scenario, you can end with the same scenario as proof that your essay is helpful in creating a new understanding. You may also refer to the introductory paragraph by using key words or parallel concepts and images that you also used in the introduction.
• Synthesize, don’t summarize. Include a brief summary of the paper’s main points, but don’t simply repeat things that were in your paper. Instead, show your reader how the points you made and the support and examples you used fit together. Pull it all together.
• Include a provocative insight or quotation from the research or reading you did for your paper.
• Propose a course of action, a solution to an issue, or questions for further study. This can redirect your reader’s thought process and help them to apply your info and ideas to their own life or to see the broader implications.
• Point to broader implications. For example, if your paper examines the Greensboro sit-ins or another event in the Civil Rights Movement, you could point out its impact on the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. A paper about the style of writer Virginia Woolf could point to her influence on other writers or on later feminists.

Strategies to avoid

• Beginning with an unnecessary, overused phrase such as “in conclusion,” “in summary,” or “in closing.” Although these phrases can work in speeches, they come across as wooden and trite in writing.
• Stating the thesis for the very first time in the conclusion.
• Introducing a new idea or subtopic in your conclusion.
• Ending with a rephrased thesis statement without any substantive changes.
• Making sentimental, emotional appeals that are out of character with the rest of an analytical paper.
• Including evidence (quotations, statistics, etc.) that should be in the body of the paper.

Four kinds of ineffective conclusions

• The “That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It” Conclusion. This conclusion just restates the thesis and is usually painfully short. It does not push the ideas forward. People write this kind of conclusion when they can’t think of anything else to say. Example: In conclusion, Frederick Douglass was, as we have seen, a pioneer in American education, proving that education was a major force for social change with regard to slavery.
• The “Sherlock Holmes” Conclusion. Sometimes writers will state the thesis for the very first time in the conclusion. You might be tempted to use this strategy if you don’t want to give everything away too early in your paper. You may think it would be more dramatic to keep the reader in the dark until the end and then “wow” them with your main idea, as in a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The reader, however, does not expect a mystery, but an analytical discussion of your topic in an academic style, with the main argument (thesis) stated up front. Example: (After a paper that lists numerous incidents from the book but never says what these incidents reveal about Douglass and his views on education): So, as the evidence above demonstrates, Douglass saw education as a way to undermine the slaveholders’ power and also an important step toward freedom.
• The “America the Beautiful”/”I Am Woman”/”We Shall Overcome” Conclusion. This kind of conclusion usually draws on emotion to make its appeal, but while this emotion and even sentimentality may be very heartfelt, it is usually out of character with the rest of an analytical paper. A more sophisticated commentary, rather than emotional praise, would be a more fitting tribute to the topic. Example: Because of the efforts of fine Americans like Frederick Douglass, countless others have seen the shining beacon of light that is education. His example was a torch that lit the way for others. Frederick Douglass was truly an American hero.
• The “Grab Bag” Conclusion. This kind of conclusion includes extra information that the writer found or thought of but couldn’t integrate into the main paper. You may find it hard to leave out details that you discovered after hours of research and thought, but adding random facts and bits of evidence at the end of an otherwise-well-organized essay can just create confusion. Example: In addition to being an educational pioneer, Frederick Douglass provides an interesting case study for masculinity in the American South. He also offers historians an interesting glimpse into slave resistance when he confronts Covey, the overseer. His relationships with female relatives reveal the importance of family in the slave community.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Douglass, Frederick. 1995. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. New York: Dover.

Hamilton College. n.d. “Conclusions.” Writing Center. Accessed June 14, 2019. https://www.hamilton.edu//academics/centers/writing/writing-resources/conclusions .

Holewa, Randa. 2004. “Strategies for Writing a Conclusion.” LEO: Literacy Education Online. Last updated February 19, 2004. https://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/conclude.html.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Writing a Paper: Conclusions

Writing a conclusion.

A conclusion is an important part of the paper; it provides closure for the reader while reminding the reader of the contents and importance of the paper. It accomplishes this by stepping back from the specifics in order to view the bigger picture of the document. In other words, it is reminding the reader of the main argument. For most course papers, it is usually one paragraph that simply and succinctly restates the main ideas and arguments, pulling everything together to help clarify the thesis of the paper. A conclusion does not introduce new ideas; instead, it should clarify the intent and importance of the paper. It can also suggest possible future research on the topic.

An Easy Checklist for Writing a Conclusion

It is important to remind the reader of the thesis of the paper so he is reminded of the argument and solutions you proposed.

Think of the main points as puzzle pieces, and the conclusion is where they all fit together to create a bigger picture. The reader should walk away with the bigger picture in mind.

Make sure that the paper places its findings in the context of real social change.

Make sure the reader has a distinct sense that the paper has come to an end. It is important to not leave the reader hanging. (You don’t want her to have flip-the-page syndrome, where the reader turns the page, expecting the paper to continue. The paper should naturally come to an end.)

No new ideas should be introduced in the conclusion. It is simply a review of the material that is already present in the paper. The only new idea would be the suggesting of a direction for future research.

Conclusion Example

As addressed in my analysis of recent research, the advantages of a later starting time for high school students significantly outweigh the disadvantages. A later starting time would allow teens more time to sleep--something that is important for their physical and mental health--and ultimately improve their academic performance and behavior. The added transportation costs that result from this change can be absorbed through energy savings. The beneficial effects on the students’ academic performance and behavior validate this decision, but its effect on student motivation is still unknown. I would encourage an in-depth look at the reactions of students to such a change. This sort of study would help determine the actual effects of a later start time on the time management and sleep habits of students.

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Technology as a Tool for Improving Patient Safety

Introduction .

In the past several decades, technological advances have opened new possibilities for improving patient safety. Using technology to digitize healthcare processes has the potential to increase standardization and efficiency of clinical workflows and to reduce errors and cost across all healthcare settings. 1 However, if technological approaches are designed or implemented poorly, the burden on clinicians can increase. For example, overburdened clinicians can experience alert fatigue and fail to respond to notifications. This can lead to more medical errors. As a testament to the significance of this topic in recent years, several government agencies [(e.g. the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS)] have developed resources to help healthcare organizations integrate technology, such as the Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience (SAFER) guides developed by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). 2,3,4  However, there is some evidence that these resources have not been widely used.5 Recently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) started requiring hospitals to use the SAFER guides as part of the FY 2022 Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment Systems (IPPS), which should raise awareness and uptake of the guides. 6

During 2022, research into technological approaches was a major theme of articles on PSNet. Researchers reviewed all relevant articles on PSNet and consulted with Dr. A Jay Holmgren, PhD, and Dr. Susan McBride, PhD, subject matter experts in health IT and its role in patient safety. Key topics and themes are highlighted below.  

Clinical Decision Support  

The most prominent focus in the 2022 research on technology, based on the number of articles published on PSNet, was related to clinical decision support (CDS) tools. CDS provides clinicians, patients, and other individuals with relevant data (e.g. patient-specific information), purposefully filtered and delivered through a variety of formats and channels, to improve and enhance care. 7   

Computerized Patient Order Entry  

One of the main applications of CDS is in computerized patient order entry (CPOE), which is the process used by clinicians to enter and send treatment instructions via a computer application. 8 While the change from paper to electronic order entry itself can reduce errors (e.g., due to unclear handwriting or manual copy errors), research in 2022 showed that there is room for improvement in order entry systems, as well as some promising novel approaches. 

Two studies looked at the frequency of and reasons for medication errors in the absence of CDS and CPOE and demonstrated that there was a clear patient safety need. One study found that most medication errors occurred during the ordering or prescribing stage, and both this study and the other study found that the most common medication error was incorrect dose. Ongoing research, such as the AHRQ Medication Safety Measure Development project, aims to develop and validate measure specifications for wrong-patient, wrong-dose, wrong-medication, wrong-route, and wrong-frequency medication orders within EHR systems, in order to better understand and capture health IT safety events.9 Errors of this type could be avoided or at least reduced through the use of effective CPOE and CDS systems. However, even when CPOE and CDS are in place, errors can still occur and even be caused by the systems themselves. One study reviewed duplicate medication orders and found that 20% of duplicate orders resulted from technological issues, including alerts being overridden, alerts not firing, and automation issues (e.g., prefilled fields). A case study last year Illustrated one of the technological issues, in this case a manual keystroke error, that can lead to a safety event. A pharmacist mistakenly set the start date for a medication to the following year rather than the following day , which the CPOE system failed to flag. The authors recommended various alerts and coding changes in the system to prevent this particular error in the future.  

There were also studies in 2022 that showed successful outcomes of well-implemented CPOE systems. One in-depth pre-post, mixed-methods study showed that a fully implemented CPOE system significantly reduced specific serious and commonly occurring prescribing and procedural errors. The authors also presented evidence that it was cost-effective and detailed implementation lessons learned drawn from the qualitative data collected for the study. A specific CPOE function that demonstrated statistically significant improvement in 2022 was automatic deprescribing of medication orders and communication of the relevant information to pharmacies. Deprescribing is the planned and supervised process of dose reduction or stopping of a medication that is no longer beneficial or could be causing harm. That study showed an immediate and sustained 78% increase in successful discontinuations after implementation of the software. A second study on the same functionality determined that currently only one third to one half of medications are e-prescribed, and the study proposed that e-prescribing should be expanded to increase the impact of the deprescribing software. It should be noted, however, that the systems were not perfect and that a small percentage of medications were unintentionally cancelled. Finally, an algorithm to detect patients in need of follow-up after test results was developed and implemented in another study . The algorithm showed some process improvements, but outcome measures were not reported. 

Usability  

Usability of CDS systems was a large focus of research in 2022. Poorly designed systems that do not fit into existing workflows lead to frustrated users and increase the potential for errors. For example, if users are required to enter data in multiple places or prompted to enter data that are not available to them, they could find ways to work around the system or even cease to use it, increasing the potential for patient safety errors. The documentation burden is already very high on U.S. clinicians, 10 so it is important that novel technological approaches do not add to this burden but, if possible, alleviate it by offering a high level of usability and interoperability.  

One study used human-factored design in creating a CDS to diagnose pulmonary embolism in the Emergency Department and then surveyed clinician users about their experiences using the tool. Despite respondents giving the tool high usability ratings and reporting that the CDS was valuable, actual use of the tool was low. Based on the feedback from users, the authors proposed some changes to increase uptake, but both users and authors mentioned the challenges that arise when trying to change the existing workflow of clinicians without increasing their burden. Another study gathered qualitative feedback from clinicians on a theoretical CDS system for diagnosing neurological issues in the Emergency Department. In this study too, many clinicians saw the potential value in the CDS tool but had concerns about workflow integration and whether it would impact their ability to make clinical decisions. Finally, one study developed a dashboard to display various risk factors for multiple hospital-acquired infections and gathered feedback from users. The users generally found the dashboard useful and easy to learn, and they also provided valuable feedback on color scales, location, and types of data displayed. All of these studies show that attention to end user needs and preferences is necessary for successful implementation of CDS.  However, the recent market consolidation in Electronic Health Record vendors may have an impact on the amount of user feedback gathered and integrated into CDS systems. Larger vendors may have more resources to devote to improving the usability and design of CDS, or their near monopolies in the market may not provide an incentive to innovate further. 11 More research is needed as this trend continues.  

Alerts and Alarms 

Alerts and alarms are an important part of most CDS systems, as they can prompt clinicians with important and timely information during the treatment process. However, these alerts and alarms must be accurate and useful to elicit an appropriate response. The tradeoff between increased safety due to alerts and clinician alert fatigue is an important balance to strike. 12

Many studies in 2022 looked at clinician responses to medication-related alerts, including override and modification rates. Several of the studies found a high alert override rate but questioned the validity of using override rates alone as a marker of CDS effectiveness and usability. For example, one study looked at drug allergy alerts and found that although 44.8% of alerts were overridden, only 9.3% of those were inappropriately overridden, and very few overrides led to an adverse allergic reaction. A study on “do not give” alerts found that clinicians modified their orders to comply with alert recommendations after 78% of alerts but only cancelled orders after 26% of alerts. A scoping review looked at drug-drug interaction alerts and found similar results, including high override rates and the need for more data on why alerts are overridden. These findings are supported by another study that found that the underlying drug value sets triggering drug-drug interaction alerts are often inconsistent, leading to many inappropriate alerts that are then appropriately overridden by clinicians. These studies suggest that while a certain number of overrides should be expected, the underlying criteria for alert systems should be designed and regularly reviewed with specificity and sensitivity in mind. This will increase the frequency of appropriate alerts that foster indicated clinical action and reduce alert fatigue. 

There also seems to be variability in the effectiveness of alert systems across sites. One study looked at an alert to add an item to the problem list if a clinician placed an order for a medication that was not indicated based on the patient’s chart. The study found about 90% accuracy in alerts across two sites but a wide difference in the frequency of appropriate action between the sites (83% and 47%). This suggests that contextual factors at each site, such as culture and organizational processes, may impact success as much as the technology itself.  

A different study looked at the psychology of dismissing alerts using log data and found that dismissing alerts becomes habitual and that the habit is self-reinforcing over time. Furthermore, nearly three quarters of alerts were dismissed within 3 seconds. This indicates how challenging it can be to change or disrupt alert habits once they are formed. 

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning  

In recent years, one of the largest areas of burgeoning technology in healthcare has been artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. AI and machine learning use algorithms to absorb large amounts of historical and real-time data and then predict outcomes and recommend treatment options as new data are entered by clinicians. Research in 2022 showed that these techniques are starting to be integrated into EHR and CDS systems, but challenges remain. A full discussion of this topic is beyond the scope of this review. Here we limit the discussion to several patient-safety-focused resources posted on PSNet in 2022.  

One of the promising aspects of AI is its ability to improve CDS processes and clinician workflow overall. For example, one study last year looked at using machine learning to improve and filter CDS alerts. They found that the software could reduce alert volume by 54% while maintaining high precision. Reducing alert volume has the potential to alleviate alert fatigue and habitual overriding. Another topic explored in a scoping review was the use of AI to reduce adverse drug events. While only a few studies reviewed implementation in a clinical setting (most evaluated algorithm technical performance), several promising uses were found for AI systems that predict risk of an adverse drug event, which would facilitate early detection and mitigate negative effects.  

Despite enthusiasm for and promising applications of AI, implementation is slow. One of the challenges facing implementation is the variable quality of the systems. For example, a commonly used sepsis detection model was recently found to have very low sensitivity. 13 Algorithms also drift over time as new data are integrated, and this can affect performance, particularly during and after large disturbances like the COVID-19 pandemic. 14 There is also emerging research about the impact of AI algorithms on racial and ethnic biases in healthcare; at the time of publication of this essay, an AHRQ EPC was conducting a review of evidence on the topic. 15  These examples highlight the fact that AI is not a “set it and forget it” application; it requires monitoring and customization from a dedicated resource to ensure that the algorithms perform well over time. A related challenge is the lack of a strong business case for using high-quality AI. Because of this, many health systems choose to use out-of-the-box AI algorithms, which may be of poor quality overall (or are unsuited to particular settings) and may also be “black box” algorithms (i.e., not customizable by the health system because the vendor will not allow access to the underlying code). 16 The variable quality and the lack of transparency may cause mistrust by clinicians and overall aversion to AI interventions.  

In an attempt to address these concerns, one article in 2022 detailed best practices for AI implementation in health systems, focusing on the business case. Best practices include using AI to address a priority problem for the health system rather than treating it as an end itself. Additionally, testing the AI using the health system’s patients and data to demonstrate applicability and accuracy for that setting, confirming that the AI can provide a return on investment, and ensuring that the AI can be implemented easily and efficiently are also important. Another white paper described a human-factors and ergonomics framework for developing AI in order to improve the implementation within healthcare systems, teams, and workflows. The federal government and international organizations have also published AI guidelines, focusing on increasing trustworthiness (National Artificial Intelligence Initiative) 17 and ensuring ethical governance (World Health Organization). 18   

Conclusion and Next Steps 

As highlighted in this review, the scope and complexity of technology and its application in healthcare can be intimidating for healthcare systems to approach and implement. Researchers last year thus created a framework that health systems can use to assess their digital maturity and guide their plans for further integration.  

The field would benefit from more research in several areas in upcoming years. First and foremost, high-quality prospective outcome studies are needed to validate the effectiveness of the new technologies. Second, more work is needed on system usability, how the systems are integrated into workflows, and how they affect the documentation burden placed on clinicians. For CDS specifically, more focus is needed on patient-centered CDS (PC CDS), which supports patient-centered care by helping clinicians and patients make the best decisions given each individual’s circumstances and preferences. 19 AHRQ is already leading efforts in this field with their CDS Innovation Collaborative project. 20 Finally, as it becomes more common to incorporate EHR scribes to ease the documentation burden, research on their impact on patient safety will be needed, especially in relation to new technological approaches. For example, when a scribe encounters a CDS alert, do they alert the clinician in all cases? 

In addition to the approaches mentioned in this article, other emerging technologies in early stages of development hold theoretical promise for improving patient safety. One prominent example is “computer vision,” which uses cameras and AI to gather and process data on what physically happens in healthcare settings beyond what is captured in EHR data, 21 including being able to detect immediately that a patient fell in their room. 22  

As technology continues to expand and improve, researchers, clinicians, and health systems must be mindful of potential stumbling blocks that could impede progress and threaten patient safety. However, technology presents a wide array of opportunities to make healthcare more integrated, efficient, and safe.  

• Cohen CC, Powell K, Dick AW, et al. The Association Between Nursing Home Information Technology Maturity and Urinary Tract Infection Among Long-Term Residents . J Appl Gerontol . 2022;41(7):1695-1701. doi: 10.1177/07334648221082024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9232878/
• https://www.healthit.gov/topic/safety/safer-guides
• https://cds.ahrq.gov/cdsconnect/repository
• https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/obrhi
• McBride S, Makar E, Ross A, et al. Determining awareness of the SAFER guides among nurse informaticists. J Inform Nurs. 2021;6(4). https://library.ania.org/ania/articles/713/view
• Sittig DF, Sengstack P, Singh H. Guidelines for US hospitals and clinicians on assessment of electronic health record safety using SAFER guides. J ama . 2022;327:719-720.
• https://library.ahima.org/doc?oid=300027#.Y-6RhXbMKHt
• https://www.healthit.gov/faq/what-computerized-provider-order-entry#:~:text=Computerized%20provider%20order%20entry%20(CPOE,paper%2C%20fax%2C%20or%20telephone
• https://digital.ahrq.gov/2018-year-review/research-spotlights/leveragin…
• Holmgren AJ, Downing NL, Bates DW, et al. Assessment of electronic health record use between US and non-US health systems. JAMA Intern Med. 2021;181:251-259. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.7071
• Holmgren AJ, Apathy NC. Trends in US hospital electronic health record vendor market concentration, 2012–2021. J Gen Intern Med. 2022. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-022-07917-3#citeas
• Co Z, Holmgren AJ, Classen DC, et al. The tradeoffs between safety and alert fatigue: data from a national evaluation of hospital medication-related clinical decision support. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2020;27:1252-1258. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32620948/
• Wong A, Otles E, Donnelly JP, et al. External validation of a widely implemented proprietary sepsis prediction model in hospitalized patients. JAMA Intern Med. 2021;181:1065-1070. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2781307
• Parikh RB, Zhang Y, Kolla L, et al. Performance drift in a mortality prediction algorithm among patients with cancer during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2022;30:348-354. https://academic.oup.com/jamia/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jamia/ocac221/6835770?login=false
• https://effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov/products/racial-disparities-health…
• https://www.statnews.com/2022/05/24/market-failure-preventing-efficient-diffusion-health-care-ai-software/
• https://www.ai.gov/strategic-pillars/advancing-trustworthy-ai/
• Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health (WHO guidance). Geneva: World Health Organization; 2021. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240029200
• Dullabh P, Sandberg SF, Heaney-Huls K, et al. Challenges and opportunities for advancing patient-centered clinical decision support: findings from a horizon scan. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2022: 29(7):1233-1243. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocac059. PMID: 35534996; PMCID: PMC9196686.
• https://cds.ahrq.gov/cdsic
• Yeung S, Downing NL, Fei-Fei L, et al. Bedside computer vision: moving artificial intelligence from driver assistance to patient safety. N Engl J Med. 2018;387:1271-1273. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMp1716891
• Espinosa R, Ponce H, Gutiérrez S, et al. A vision-based approach for fall detection using multiple cameras and convolutional neural networks: a case study using the UP-Fall detection dataset. Comput Biol Med. 2019;115:103520. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compbiomed.2019.103520

This project was funded under contract number 75Q80119C00004 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The authors are solely responsible for this report’s contents, findings, and conclusions, which do not necessarily represent the views of AHRQ. Readers should not interpret any statement in this report as an official position of AHRQ or of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. None of the authors has any affiliation or financial involvement that conflicts with the material presented in this report. View AHRQ Disclaimers

Perspective

Perspectives on Safety

Annual Perspective

Patient Safety Innovations

Suicide Prevention in an Emergency Department Population: ED-SAFE

WebM&M Cases

The Retrievals. August 9, 2023

Agent of change. August 1, 2018

Amid lack of accountability for bias in maternity care, a California family seeks justice. August 16, 2023

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An Update on the Quality of American Health Care Through the Patient's Lens. April 12, 2006

Improving patient safety by shifting power from health professionals to patients. October 25, 2023

Patient Safety Primers

Discharge Planning and Transitions of Care

Medicines-related harm in the elderly post-hospital discharge. March 27, 2019

Emergency department crowding: the canary in the health care system. November 3, 2021

Advancing Patient Safety: Reviews From the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Making Healthcare Safer III Report. September 2, 2020

Exploring Alternatives To Malpractice Litigation. January 15, 2014

Making Healthcare Safer III. March 18, 2020

Special Section: Patient Safety. May 24, 2006

The Science of Simulation in Healthcare: Defining and Developing Clinical Expertise. November 19, 2008

Compendium of Strategies to Prevent HAIs in Acute Care Hospitals 2014. September 1, 2014

Quality, Safety, and Noninterpretive Skills. November 11, 2015

Patient Safety. November 21, 2018

Ambulatory Safety Nets to Reduce Missed and Delayed Diagnoses of Cancer

Remote response team and customized alert settings help improve management of sepsis.

Using sociotechnical theory to understand medication safety work in primary care and prescribers' use of clinical decision support: a qualitative study. May 24, 2023

Human factors and safety analysis methods used in the design and redesign of electronic medication management systems: a systematic review. May 17, 2023

Journal Article

Reducing hospital harm: establishing a command centre to foster situational awareness.

The potential for leveraging machine learning to filter medication alerts. May 4, 2022

Improving the specificity of drug-drug interaction alerts: can it be done? April 6, 2022

A qualitative study of prescribing errors among multi-professional prescribers within an e-prescribing system. December 23, 2020

The tradeoffs between safety and alert fatigue: data from a national evaluation of hospital medication-related clinical decision support. July 29, 2020

Assessment of health information technology-related outpatient diagnostic delays in the US Veterans Affairs health care system: a qualitative study of aggregated root cause analysis data. July 22, 2020

Reducing drug prescription errors and adverse drug events by application of a probabilistic, machine-learning based clinical decision support system in an inpatient setting. August 21, 2019

Improving medication-related clinical decision support. March 7, 2018

The frequency of inappropriate nonformulary medication alert overrides in the inpatient setting. April 6, 2016

The effect of provider characteristics on the responses to medication-related decision support alerts. July 15, 2015

Best practices: an electronic drug alert program to improve safety in an accountable care environment. July 1, 2015

Impact of computerized physician order entry alerts on prescribing in older patients. March 25, 2015

Differences of reasons for alert overrides on contraindicated co-prescriptions by admitting department. December 17, 2014

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