How Education Fails to Educate

How important is the origin of a word? Can the years of use actually change the original intent? What impact does this change have on the results or outcomes?
For example, what does it mean to educate within the American Public education system? If you would ask a group of parents, teachers, administrators, business owners, taxpayers and students, do you think that you would receive the same response from every individual? If the responses are different, how will this affect the performance of those involved as they work towards the outcomes or results?
Educate comes from the Latin word “educo” which means to educe -- draw out or to develop from within. If education is originally about development, then the simple question is are you developing your students?
Of course this now means, what does a developed student look like? What qualities, skills, competencies does a developed student have? Do I develop a elementary student in a different way than a middle school student compared to a high school or college student? Where does learning or teaching the core subjects or academic disciplines fit within this development? And finally how, do I develop any student from within? To answer these questions begins with how we educate and train individuals whose desire is to teach.
During the last 15 years from my speaking, working in schools and observing teachers, I have learned that the number one obstacle that prevents the teachers from creating an engaged learning classroom is the beliefs of students. These beliefs drive the attitudes that are the observable classroom behaviors. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of those teachers NEVER, I repeat NEVER, had any training when earning their 4-year degree to learn how to address beliefs or attitudes less alone how to redevelop them. From a performance perspective, these pre-service teaches have been set up to fail.
Until teachers are educated in the true sense of the word, we will continue to fail to educate the majority of young students within public schools. But once teachers understand and are committed to developing young people beyond the acquisition of cognitive knowledge, incredible results will happen very quickly within each and every classroom. And from these efforts, we will have a society far richer than we ever imagined.