Educate is the Latin past participle of the word educere which means "bring up, rear." This is important because part of the basis of education in America is to get a hold of a person as early as possible in order to rear that person within the mindsets and consciousness that the education system provides. You learn how to listen, follow directions, do things in particular order, and follow suit with the others that are doing as you do - as early as possible. This becomes normalized behavior, as you will need to know how to do this in the work world.
The word educate itself literally means "lead out." To bring up, rear, and lead out of a type of consciousness. Compulsory education swept the world as a means to get lower classes of people to side politically with the rulers of government, be they monarchs or other rulers of political office. If allegiance is changed from parent to state, then it is much easier to rally people in support of the state versus the family. The person who is known as the father of compulsory education as it is known in America today is Horace Mann. State controlled schooling, worldwide, was a way to control the masses without having to use the threat of the being imprisioned or murdered by the state for rebellion. You simply only needed to go to school to "stay out of trouble."
Charlotte Iserbyt's job in the Department of Education under the Regan administration was to identify "resisters" of programs such as drug ed, sex ed, suicide ed etc. and con them into agreeing with state programs by putting them on a committees to make them feel important and destroy their resistance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDyDtYy2I0M
Benjamin Bloom's theory of education can be summed up in this quote of his from Bloom's Taxonomy: "The purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students."
The consciousness you were born with and raised with; moral consciousness and value consciousness; is challenged, broken, and changed during school. It is here that your morals and values are replaced with a more generally accepted, much more open and sort of "clean slate" type of consciousness where the "norms" of society are bred. Sleep, wake, eat quickly, work, eat quickly, home, eat quickly, sleep, repeat.
Self education is the process of bringing yourself out of, or rearing yourself away from, the common mainstream learning process that currently exists - person enters school a blank slate with no "job skills," and leaves school with "job skills" ready to work - in order to grow within yourself (through proper guidance for your moral life through God's Word and accountability and responsibility for your education) the ability to have critical thought and control over your own direction, versus giving yourself as a blank slate to the education system.
Schools teach you how to "love your work" - to pick something based upon tests that you may be good at doing repetitively for the rest of your life, and not necessarily something that will nurture your gifts and talents and what you truly want to do as a service to God for others (because God is separate from education and politics in America).
In order to obtain knowledge, you have to have a question to answer. Knowledge is not meant to be generally absorbed without any kind of direction or reason or discernment. The course on PhotoReading teaches students to how first determine what they are looking for from a book, how to pick the entire book apart quickly and efficiently in order to retain the author's purpose for the book and to provide you with the skills you sought after in that material instead of filling your mind with additional opinions and information contrary to your actual purpose for reading.
A perfect example is the high schooler who goes to college because that is what is expected - to "learn something." The high schooler goes into college as a sponge - absorbing and soaking up whatever a teacher provides, regardless as to whether they entered college with a pre-determined pathway such as lawyer or doctor, and comes out of college with a degree the result of knowledge absorbtion - General Education, Doctor, Lawyer (because you can be a general practice doctor, and a lawyer that specializes in "law" and not the specific needs of the people) - to become a "worker" in society. 15 years later (if it takes that long) the former high schooler, turned college student, turned functioning adult in society cannot understand their unhappiness with life and the career they chose when they were 17, 18, 19 years old.
When we approach our education with a question of what it is that we want to know, instead of assuming that all "knowledge" is good knowledge, then our education becomes self-education.
