Peace: Getting to the Heart of it.

Until now you probably gave no consideration to the meaning of the words education and instruction or to the relationship between the two. Like most people the fact you used the two interchangeably, or at a minimum believed that to instruct was to educate. In spite of this general ignorance, the ideas we are discussing here are not really novel; they simply have never been globally applied before. But now that the spotlight has been shone on them it is obvious that instruction is not education and Benson is correct in calling instruction the handmaiden of education.

Education appears to be much more complicated than we have been led to believe by the education community. The education system is actually an instruction system because instruction is what they have been delivering. However, this does not represent a failure on their part; they have been true to their mission. Allow me to explain.

On a local level the goal of instruction is to impart to the young the values that the local community has determined is important for its survival. This is why schools exist for individuals. The instruction that takes place in the schools and universities reflect the identity of the local region. It reflects that region’s level of development. The purpose of the schools is not to bring development to a region but to pass on to the members of that society the development that has already occurred in the region. Our proximity to other regions may blur that fact but it becomes clearer when we consider humanity as an entity. Schools around the world exist to pass on to the world’s inhabitants the existing state of humanity’s development. So, one could say that schools engage in instruction to maintain the education status of the race, not to change it. Strictly speaking, one cannot educate an individual; one can only educate a species. You cannot educate an individual because an individual is a product of his species not a product of his classroom. The “education” we receive in the classroom only determines where our performance ranks relative to other humans in our social group.

Instruction does not only take place among humans. We are the only species that come together in groups solely for the purpose of instruction but, as we saw in Benson’s description of education, instruction takes place in every species. The young learn from the adults around them what identifies the species. This is what is happening when a lioness teaches its young cubs how to hunt. Humans call this informal education.

Two points need to be noted. The first is that the education of other species is complete and stable so that what the young are instructed in today for the survival of the species is relatively the same as it has been for centuries. In America, a wolf from 500 years ago could adequately train a cub born in this century so that it could survive in the wild. The biological, physiological and cultural education or evolution of non-human species is complete and adults in non-human species instruct their young because of that fact.

An American human being from 500 years ago could not adequately train an infant born in America in this century so that it could survive here. This is because humans have changed in a way that other species have not changed. We have changed because our evolution has never been complete. Culturally we have continued to evolve. But our school curriculum makes the assumption that necessary but faulty assumption that our evolution is complete.

Distrust is not a product of poor instruction but of poor education. The current education paradigm does not educate; it only instructs because it does not focus on the needs of the race.