Education System

An education system is an intentional system consisting of at least one teacher and one student in a context.


Note: to be an education system:

  • it does not have to be a formal school or a university system, which is just one way of organizing education, with a superintendent or president as leaders;
  • teachers do not need to be licensed and formally educated adults;
  • students are not restricted to those in school or universities, nor only to young persons;
  • the context does not need to be a school building or a campus;
  • the content does not need to be subject matter typically taught in schools and universities--e.g., math, science, history, biology, music, etc.

The requirements for an education system are that:

An example of an early education system was Socrates leading his followers in Greece, as described in The Republic by Plato.

  • Socrates did the overall leading (e.g., towards the goal of thinking critically about philosophy, and questioning Sophist values);
  • Socrates also did the guiding of student learning (e.g., through provocative statements and scenarios, by asking probing questions--later known as Socratic Method of Teaching);
  • his band of adult followers were the students;
  • the context was places in the city of Athens; and
  • the content was topics in philosophy (e.g., theory of universals, What is justice?, What is the ideal city-state? Why should philosopher kings govern?).

This definition of education system used here is taken from the theory of Totally Integrated Education (TIE).

For similar conceptions of an education system, see:

Common among these definitions: an education system must include teacher, student, content, and context components which are related. For example, teaching-studenting processes and teaching-studenting structures are types of relationships between teachers and students in an education system. Further types of relationships include student-content, teacher-content, etc.

See Frick (2020) for further examples of education system component relations.