What is education?

An old, classic debate seems relevant today, at least for those involved in the work of schooling.  On one hand, education is something real, a specific set of practices and outcomes that every teacher and student strive to achieve.  This underlies many relevant ideas about what school should be, including what needs to be taught, how it best should be taught and why society should go about teaching at all.  Read many textbooks, current or decrepit, to find the essential elements of content.  Truth is both evident and overt; methods of teaching are learnable and perfectable; measures of learning are accurate and predictive.

The counter argues something like this:

"There is something real, but not universal.  Do not look outside of some particular thing for the essence of that thing.  That thing that you see is all that there is to that thing."  For example, think of education.  Whatever general idea you have about what it is, how is works or what people do in it comes not from something that truly exists.  Rather, your idea is formed by all the specific examples of education you have experienced.  The concept of education forms from the repetition of these examples, that you gloop together in forming your schema of education.

Now, I recognize that schooling and education need not be the same thing.  Many, I suppose, will express a great faith in education but denigrate the actual schools in which it takes place.  Fair enough.  Yet, this is an example of conflating an ought - the best of what education should be - with an is - the actual state of any particular school.  And while some might argue that real reality has itself become a concept (or a fiction formed by a faith in essence over existence), others express the same point as epistemelogical modesty.

A question then, for any of you who are teachers or who have a stake in what education is to be. Ask yourself not just what education is or what it is for, nor just what works in schooling, but a more ontological question about yourself: "how do I know I know what I know?"