ABSTRACT
How do we make sense of human experience? How do we make meaning out of the muddles of multiple meanings and meaninglessness? How do we get a sense of direction in living, a sense of awareness, a heightened consciousness? In the history of human life, there must be thousands of different answers to these familiar questions. For those social orders and groups which do maintain a continuity in existence, i.e., maintain a commonly shared way of making sense of their continued existence, education, informal or formal, must play a conspicuous role. Education is a process of the renewal of the meanings of human experience, of control of that experience, and sometimes of a growth for both individuals and groups. These remarks are just as apt for open education as for the development of the closed mind. Education is a process by which social groups maintain continuous existence and this fact is true of all sorts of qualitatively different social orders, good and bad, enlightened and dark.
