What education is and is not

Philip Kitchner has a thoughtful point (in his NYTimes critique of Thomas Nagel): "Nagel’s 19th-century predecessors wondered how life could be characterized in physico-chemical terms. That particular wonder hasn’t been directly addressed by the extraordinary biological accomplishments of past decades. Rather, it’s been shown that they were posing the wrong question: don’t ask what life is (in your deepest Newtonian voice); consider the various activities in which living organisms engage and try to give a piecemeal understanding of those."

He adds some of Dewey's advice on how to go about understanding a world that lacks ultimate certainty: "First, philosophy and science don’t always answer the questions they pose — sometimes they get over them. Second, instead of asking what life and mind and value are, think about what living things and minds do, and what is going on in the human practices of valuing ... a kinder approach would be to talk about the ways in which various aspects of living things have been illuminated."

Let me repurpose, and rephrase, these claims for education more tersely:
There is no 'education' but many educations
Understanding them must not mean trying to unite them.
Answers often go on long past the questions that they address.
Description unveils more layers and levels of experience that prescription can.
Ask how we know we know what we know.
Start over.

Schools are ecology, full of social life, the life of the mind, public good emerging in collaborated life and the various of lives of students on full display of emotions and sentiment being earned from moment to moment. Education, writ large, is the holding frame of all this life.  It is not something that holds together form the outside, but rather makes sense as some 'thing' only in the retrospective; what has happened when all this life occurs, under what contexts, encompassing what intentions, motivations and desires?  That is education

Arguing for what is lost in online education (in a different op-ed, published on the same day),  Aaron Hirsh writes of that at best education, "... courses prompt and equip students to investigate the world, leading not merely to a diploma and a salary, but to a more engaged life — not just to a richer bank balance, but to a richer existence."

Schools, and classrooms, are engaged life.  As long as education requires only the demonstration of knowledge mastery and skill competency, a restricted, efficiency-focused, low resource schooling makes ideal sense. But then, the experience of being educated withdraws. All that life happens, untutored and un-applicable to these emergent lives.