The debate on improving educational standards never ends. Let us consider what is meant by giving a child a good education in the total sense of the word.
Education is important not simply for imparting information about specific subjects but, more importantly, for the passing on of a whole “culture” of learning, attitudes, and behaviour. As Michael Oakshott, the English philosopher, writes, “A man is his culture. What he is, he has had to learn to become.”
Good teaching initiates the student into an inheritance of human achievements. This inheritance consists of a variety of abilities. Each of these abilities combines “information” and “judgement”. When united with specific information, judgement generates knowledge or “ability” to do, to make, or to understand and explain – it becomes, in the end, the ability to think wisely and compassionately.