Blog.

What is an Education?

 

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

 

I have recently run into this quote, and it immediately reminded me of my school years. I have attended primary school, college and university where each level was expected to teach more specific, more advanced and more interesting courses, at least I’d thought it was.

Alas, they taught me facts, other facts and yet another facts. I particularly hated “facts flooded courses” such as history or geography not because of the topics themselves but because I couldn’t make up my mind what could I do with information like “The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in Belgium” or “The length of the Amazon River is 6,992 km”.

Much better were “Electronic Courses” where they taught us how to design circuits, how to calculate voltages and currents in them, how to measure this and that. Still, they did not teach us how to solder an integrated circuit into a printed circuit board or how to make the board itself.

Now, years older and more experienced, I think I now know what their, and thus mine, problem with education was. Teachers thought that:

 

Education == Facts

More educated == Knows more facts

It is not true.

I only want those important (senior) facts that I need to achieve the desired result. I also need the ability to find, study and understand additional facts if they are needed for that what I want to do. And I also need the ability to recognize that I am missing a fact what triggers my learning cycle.

May I  paraphrase Albert Einstein to express what I think the education is?

 

 

Education is teaching people to know how to do things.Saki

 

That is also the goal of the educational part of this site: To give you the knowledge you need to develop your ExtJS, Touch or other applications faster and better.

saki
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