Discipline meaning in education and education project topics

Most at times seeing or hearing the word education, many people always think of places like schools, colleges, polytechnics, and universities. And when hearing the word, many people often confuse it with schooling or at times they might also look to particular jobs like teaching or tutoring and the problem with this is that education as discipline entails much more than schooling or particular jobs like teaching or tutoring.
Apparently, education as a field of study is analyzed on different characteristics of a discipline. The term education has a multifaceted meaning. Therefore, before analyzing the nature of education as a discipline it is necessary to first analyze the meaning of the term ‘education’, before going into the discipline meaning in education.

1. DISCIPLINE MEANING IN EDUCATION AND EDUCATION PROJECT TOPICS


Most at times seeing or hearing the word education, many people always think of places like
schools, colleges, polytechnics, and universities. And when hearing the word, many people often
confuse it with schooling or at times they might also look to particular jobs like teaching or
tutoring and the problem with this is that education as discipline entails much more than
schooling or particular jobs like teaching or tutoring.
Apparently, education as a field of study is analyzed on different characteristics of a discipline.
The term education has a multifaceted meaning. Therefore, before analyzing the nature of
education as a discipline it is necessary to first analyze the meaning of the term ‘education’,
before going into the discipline meaning in education.

What is Education?

The term “Education” in English, ‖ was taken or derived from the Latin words Educare, Educere,
and Educatum. And the term “Educatum”‖ denotes the act of teaching, it also means to train or
mold. The terms Educare and Educere mean to bring up, to lead out, or to draw out propulsion,
or impetus from inward to outward. These all terms mainly indicate the development of the
latent faculties of the child.
The term education stands for both the study of the field and for the formal enterprise (or system)
that is being studied. To understand this dual meaning very well, consider these two definitions
of education.
The first is a standard definition from the American Heritage Dictionary:
1. The act or process of educating or being educated.
2. The knowledge or skill obtained or developed by a learning process.
3. A Program of instruction of a specified kind or level.
4. The field of study that is concerned with the pedagogy of teaching and learning.
5. An instructive or enlightening experience.
The second is from the essay on “Education”, by William Frankena in the Dictionary of the
History of Ideas:

2. 1. As the activity of one doing the educating, the act or process of educating or teaching engaged
in by the educator.
2. The process or experience of being educated or learning that goes on in the one being educated.
3. As the result produced and in the one being educated by the double process of educating and
being educated.
4. As a discipline or study of education.
From these definitions, it is clear that the term “Education” is used in three senses: Knowledge,
Subject, and Process.
In the first sense, all formal and informal knowledge gained by an individual during his or her
lifetime is termed as his or her education. When a person achieves a degree up to a certain level,
we do not call it education. For example, if a person has secured a Master's Degree then we
utilize education in a much-narrowed sense and call or say that the person has achieved
education up to Masters Level.
In the second sense, education is used in a sense of discipline. For example, if a person had taken
education as a paper or as a discipline during his study in any institution then we utilize
education as a subject. As a field of study education is a contemplative search for theory and
science of the process of educating. In the third sense, education is used as a process. In fact
when we talk of education, we talk in the third sense i.e. education as a process. As an enterprise
it contains various systems of education and, therefore, primarily an activity. However, in this
study, we are dealing only with second meaning of education i.e. education as a subject or
discipline that is taught at various levels. The subject relates itself to the preparation of educators
and the study of teaching-learning conditions. Most precisely the discipline of Education can be
defined as the study of the process of educating. It studies various factors, methods, and elements
involved in the process of educating. In this view, educators look to act with people rather on
them. Their task is to educe (related to the Greek notion of educere), to bring out or develop
potential. Such education is:
 Deliberate and hopeful. It is learning we set out to make happen in the belief that people can ‘be
more’;
 Informed, respectful, and wise. A process of inviting truth and possibility.
 Grounded in a desire that at all may flourish and share in life. It is a cooperative and inclusive
activity that looks to help people to live their lives as well as they can.
It also studies various principles and ideas govern this process. A major purpose of education as
a field of study is to help to understand and improve the enterprise. As an activity, the education
enterprise is highly complex. Its immediate purpose relates to the intellectual, moral, social, and
physical development of our students, and its functions, socially and civically, to maintain and
improve a democratic way of life, such complexity, with competing goals and values, requires
strong analytical thinking and understanding so that the system is operated in a thoughtful and
effective way. Therefore the discipline of education has been designed to prepare scholars who
are responsible for both the field of study of education and the educational enterprise.

3. Education in Primitive and Early Civilized societies

The term education can be applied to primitive societies only in the sense of enculturation, which
is the process of cultural transmission. A primitive person, whose culture is the totality of his
universe, has a generally fixed sense of cultural progression and timelessness. The model of life
is relatively static and absolute, and it is transmitted from one generation to another with little
deviation. As for prehistoric education, it can only be inferred from educational practices in
surviving primitive societies.
The purpose of primitive education was to guide their children to become good members of
their tribe or band. There is a marked emphasis upon training for citizenship because primitive
people are highly concerned with the growth of individuals as tribal members and the thorough
comprehension of their way of life during the passage from prepuberty to postpuberty.
Because of the variety in the countless thousands of primitive societies, it is difficult to describe
any standard and uniform characteristics of prepuberty education. Nevertheless, certain things
are practiced commonly within cultures. Children actually participate in the social processes of
adult activities, and their participatory learning is based upon what the American
anthropologist Margaret Mead called empathy, identification, and imitation. Primitive children,
before reaching puberty, learn by doing and observing basic technical practices. Their teachers
are not strangers but rather their immediate community.

In contrast to the spontaneous and rather unregulated imitations in prepuberty education,
postpuberty education in some cultures is strictly standardized and regulated. The teaching
personnel may consist of fully initiated men, often unknown to the initiate though they are his
relatives in other clans. The initiation may begin with the initiate being abruptly separated from
his familial group and sent to a secluded camp where he joins other initiates. The purpose of this
separation is to deflect the initiate’s deep attachment away from his family and to establish his
emotional and social anchorage in the wider web of his culture.
The initiation “curriculum” does not usually include practical subjects. Instead, it consists of a
whole set of cultural values, tribal religion, myths, philosophy, history, rituals, and other
knowledge. Primitive people in some cultures regard the body of knowledge constituting the
initiation curriculum as most essential to their tribal membership. Within this essential
curriculum, religious instruction takes the most prominent place.

4. Education in the earliest civilizations

The history of civilization started in the Middle East about 3000 BCE, whereas the North China
civilization began about a millennium and a half later.
The Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations flourished almost simultaneously during the first
civilizational phase (3000–1500 BCE). Although these civilizations differed, they shared
monumental literary achievements. The need for the perpetuation of these highly developed
civilizations made writing and formal education indispensable.

Education as a Discipline
Education is a relatively new discipline that combines aspects of Psychology, history,
philosophy, sociology, and some practical studies. Its domain is the whole complex of the
process of educating. The discipline of education is nowadays a compulsory subject used for
educating teacher educators. Education is, of course, also a field of research that aims to
understand the process of education. The main problems and questions education deals with what
content should be taught to pupils and students (the question of the curriculum)? How should the
content be taught (the question of teaching method)? What other educational goals shall be
pursued in addition to teaching knowledge and skills (the question of values)? In other words,
education has to answer the questions of truth, learning, and morals. It has to reflect on the
higher goals of education beyond passing on random knowledge and skills. The study of
education would be the reflexive effort of looking at the reality of education and trying to
understand how it is practiced.
This is a serious question that whether education can be called a discipline, and there are three
schools of thought on the subject. The first suggests that since education borrows from and
combines with other, more traditional, disciplines and often focuses on practice, it should not be
called a discipline but a field of study or a second-level discipline. Using the same rationale (that
many areas within education bring together a traditional discipline within an educational frame),
the second school of thought calls education an inter-discipline. In addition, education has its
own set of problems, questions, knowledge bases, and approaches to inquiry; the third school of
thought pushes for accepting education as a discipline.
One reason for the lack of consensus around the use of 'discipline‘ for education is that as a field
of study, education may be seen as one of a set of academic program anomalies in which
enterprise itself is primarily an activity. Within universities, this includes schools and colleges
that are considered professional schools: engineering, nursing, medicine, law, social work. In the
words of Klein 1990,8 We could say that education, as a professional school, is a second-level
discipline in that it focuses on a unique activity-education- by borrowing, considerably, from
many traditional disciplines.

5. Looking specifically at areas in education that bring together a traditional discipline and
education, we could use the term inter-discipline to describe education. Considering education as
an inter-discipline suggests that the work of scholarship in education should focus on bringing
together the disciplines as a means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be
satisfactorily addressed using single methods or approaches.
At this point, it would be well worth examining education as a discipline. Not only does
education have its own set of problems, questions and knowledge bases, and approaches to the
inquiry but also that which is borrowed from other disciplines often becomes transformed within
the study of education. To evaluate education on different criteria of a discipline, objectives of
studying education as a discipline should be considered first because objectives of study delimit
and decide the nature and scope of any field of study.
Education is a discipline that is concerned highly with the methods of teaching and learning in
schools or school-like environments as opposed to various nonformal and informal means
of socialization (e.g., rural development projects and education through parent-child
relationships).
Education can also be seen as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a
society. In this sense, it is equivalent to what social scientists term socialization or enculturation.
Children—whether conceived among New Guinea tribespeople, the Renaissance Florentines, or
the middle classes of Manhattan—are born without culture.
Education is designed to guide the young generations in learning a culture, molding their
behavior in the ways of adulthood, and directing them toward their eventual role in society. In
the most primitive cultures, there is often little formal learning—little of what one would
ordinarily call school or classes or teachers. Instead, the entire environment and all activities are
frequently viewed as schools and classes, and many or all adults act as teachers.
However, as societies grow to be more complex, the quantity of knowledge to be passed on from
one generation to the next generation becomes more than any one person can know, and, hence,
there must evolve more selective and efficient means of cultural transmission, and the outcome
or the result is formal education—the school and the specialist called the teacher.
As society becomes ever more complex and schools become ever more institutionalized, the
educational experience becomes less directly related to daily life, less a matter of showing and
learning in the context of the workaday world, and more abstracted from practice, more a matter
of distilling, telling, and learning things out of context.
This concentration of learning in a formal atmosphere allows children to learn far more of their
culture than they are able to do by merely observing and imitating. As society gradually attaches
more and more importance to education, it also tries to formulate the overall objectives, content,
organization, and strategies of education. Literature becomes laden with advice on the rearing of
the younger generation. In short, there develop philosophies and theories of education.

6. Education project topics

THE PROBLEMS OF TEACHING PHYSICAL AND HEALTH EDUCATION IN
JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS (A CASE STUDY OF SELECTED SCHOOLS IN
BWARI AREA COUNCIL, FCT-ABUJA)
COMPARISM OF USING TWO EDUCATIONAL MEDIA IN TEACHING AND
LEARNING DIGESTIVE SYSTEM OF FARM ANIMALS IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS
IN ADAMAWA STATE
EFFECTS OF TEACHERS’ EXPERIENCE IN THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF
STUDENTS IN MATHE MATICS (A CASE STUDY OF SOME SELECTED
SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN IFAKO IJAYE LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF
LAGOS STATE)
EFFECTS OF PRACTICAL METHOD ON THE EFFECTIVE TEACHING OF
PHYSICS IN SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS. (A CASE STUDY OF OJODU LOCAL
GOVERNMENT AREA IN LAGOS STATE)
EFFECTS OF COMPUTER -BASED INSTRUCTION ON THE LEARNING
EFFECTIVENESS OF HEARING IMPAIRED PUPILS IN LAGOS STATE SPECIAL
PRIMARY SCHOOLS
DISTRIBUTION AND UTILIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN TWO
STATE/FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OWNED SCHOOLS IN LAGOS STATE
INVESTIGATION INTO OPENNESS -VALUES AND COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING
FACTORS INFLUENCING SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC
ACHIEVEMENT IN ONDO NIGERIA
IMPACT OF TEACHER’S EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATION ON THE
PERFORMANCE OF SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN ECONOMICS
CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS OF TEACHING AND LEARNING VERBS IN
SECONDARY SCHOOLS (A STUDY OF TW O SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN LAGOS
STATE)
TRANSFORMING TERTIARY INSTITUTIONS FOR MASS HIGHER EDUCATION
THROUGH DISTANCE AND OPEN LEARNING APPROACHES IN NIGERIA