What ‘to educate’ really means?

As a father and educator, have you ever wandered where the word ‘Educate’ originates from?

Certainly, you must have asked yourself what it really means to educate someone, and as a father I have asked myself this same question a few times with regards to my two-years-old son, especially when I felt that my role as an educator was particularly challenging…

Well, to educate may well mean different things to different people, and my aim is not to say what is right or wrong. On the contrary, I find it fascinating to look at the etymology of words. That is, to go to the roots of words as I find that it gives a great deal of knowledge and enlightenment. So, to educate comes from Latin, and is made of two elements: ‘e-ducere’. So let’s have a closer look at what this means.

The particle ‘E’ means ‘from, out, of’. The verb ‘Ducere’ means ‘to lead, to conduct and to draw, to get’.

Hence, to educate someone is to lead someone to get out (form him/herself, from the inside) the good character, the values that are innate and that already belong to that individual. So to educate is about facilitating someone’s greatness, that already belongs to him or her, originally at birth (I would say…). From the analysis of the etymology of the word it seems not to mean, then, ‘I tell you what you need to do’, or ‘I know what it is good for you’. Funny enough, there is no reference to the word discipline either, that I often hear as being one of the main ingredients of a good education.

So if we fully embraced our role of educators as meant to be following the original meaning of the word ‘educate’, what could change in our life, and in the way we relate to our children? And what would change for them, and in the way they would relate to us (and to others)?

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2. Father-son relationship: Bill Gates talks of his father’s role at the CNN

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