the conduit

I don’t want to get bogged down in etymology, and I don’t think that words have “original” meanings that are any truer or more natural than the way they are used today, but I do think it is important in our age of specialization to look back on words for lost or forgotten convergences. With that disclosure out of the way, we can look at why I titled the site “the conduit”.

Some time ago I looked up the etymology of the word education to find that it leads back to the latin root word “ducere”–to lead. So education shares things in common with conducting, conduct, introducing, producing, deducing or any old duct work that leads the way. Curiously it also shares with some less benign forms of leading–inducing, seducing, abducting. Anyway, this site is a place for thinking about education and so it is important to think about the kind of leading educators are doing and whether or not any of it is, or can be, benign. Most edifying in all this educational archaelogy is the idea that “education” comes from “ex” “ducere”–leading out of. Conducting on the other hand comes from “leading together”. Whether you view education as liberatory or conservative or some combination of the two, it is important to talk about this leading and what it leads to.