Introduction
There are many concepts of education that view the place and role of students from different perspectives. Thomas Henry Huxley’s theory approaches learning as part of learning about the laws of nature. The latter is seen as a game with its own rules and laws, which can be comprehended in different ways. Comparing formal education with the process of learning in the context of surviving in the environment, the author claims there are no uneducated people in the world.
Discussion
People begin to learn about nature long before they enter their first educational institution. Hence, there is a difference between formal education, which gives academic skills and knowledge, and natural education, which operates with the help of feelings. Each person is introduced to the world through the senses: “Nature would begin to teach him, through the eye, the ear, the touch, the properties of objects.” The common point between formal education and natural one is that they bring people closer to the environment. However, minimal understanding can only come through bodily contact or sensation, which shows how to act rightly or wrongly in certain circumstances.
The purpose of formal education is to adapt students to a further, more complex understanding of the world. According to the author, “The object of what we commonly call education in which man intervenes and which I shall distinguish as artificial education to make good these defects in Nature’s methods; to prepare the child to receive Nature’s education.” The author claims that formal education serves as a tool for learning the world, but it does not mean that a person who has not attended a school or a university can be called uneducated. The study of nature in terms of various social institutions involves an adaptation to how the world can affect a man and how to properly read and apply it to one’s life.
Conclusion
Thus, education is not an indicator that can be evaluated in terms of its presence or absence in a person’s life. It is a natural process, triggered from the first minutes of a child’s life and not entirely with the workings of the mind or even the intellect. Sense organs, emotions, and sensations, which, like many thousands of years ago, tell people the rules of existence.