ABSTRACT
It is important to delineate the field of ‘primary’ education with care, distinguishing it from ‘elementary’ education, from which it has evolved and with which, in many countries, it often remains conflated. The Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary contains a number of definitions of ‘primary’, each of which can apply to education in different contexts. One definition is ‘fundamental, basic’. This would appear to be the sort of elementary education which is seen as a matter of introducing the basic skills and rudimentary facts to the ‘masses’. ‘Basic’ education is not age specific and can imply a separate educational pathway in itself
