The primary ineluctable facts of the relationship and death of each one of the essential members in a ethnic assemble determine the necessity of Education.On one hand, there is the contrast between the immaturity of the new-born members of the group—its future sole representatives—and the matureness of the adult members who possess the knowledge and tariff of the group.
On the other hand, there is the necessity that these embryonic members be not but physically preserved in adequate numbers, but that they be initiated into the interests, purposes, information, skill, and practices of the mature members: otherwise the assemble will cease its characteristic life.
Even in a savage tribe, the achievements of adults are far beyond what the embryonic members would be confident of if left to themselves. With the growth of civilization, the gap between the warning capacities of the embryonic and the standards and tariff of the elders increases.
Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the chronicle of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required.
Beings who are born not only unaware of, but quite indifferent to, the aims and habits of the ethnic assemble have to be rendered cognizant of them and actively interested. Education, and education alone, spans the gap.
Society exists finished a process of sending quite as such as biological life. This sending occurs by effectuation of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.
Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the assemble chronicle to those who are coming into it, ethnic chronicle could not survive.
If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a duty directed by personal interest rather than ethnic need. Now it is a work of necessity.
The Place of Formal Education cannot be overemphasized. There is, accordingly, a marked difference between the education which every one gets from living with others, as long as he really lives instead of just continuing to subsist, and the deliberate educating of the young.
In the former case the education is incidental; it is uncolored and important, but it is not the express reason of the association.
While it may be said, without exaggeration, that the manoeuvre of the worth of any ethnic institution, economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its gist in enlarging and improving experience; yet this gist is not a conception of its warning motive, which is limited and more immediately practical.
associations began, for example, in the desire to bonded the souvenir of overruling powers and to ward off evil influences; kinsfolk chronicle in the desire to gratify appetites and bonded kinsfolk perpetuity; systematic labor, for the most part, because of enslavement to others, etc.
gradually was the by-product of the institution, its gist upon the calibre and extent of conscious life, noted, and only more gradually still was this gist thoughtful as a directive factor in the carry of the institution. Visit Nigeria Discussion Forum to read more or educational articles
