Every month, there are thirty-three thousand Google searches on the search string “what is education?” Given the importance of the idea of education, and the perplexity about it, there is not much to find.

But the site isn’t just about providing resources for those who discover the inadequacies of their dictionaries .

Education – true education – matters. It profoundly underpins the effectiveness and value of everything we try to do. Everything. That includes our own personal efforts to build worthwhile lives for ourselves – lives that have meaning and are our own. Your life. My life.

Unfortunately, the traditional ways of working with the word have become tired, even though the point of it, the underlying purpose of it, is as vital to our living well as ever it was when it was at its best. As it has become feeble and less and less convincing in its application, two very negative social processes have been making inroads on the term, working to destroy its core meaning.

One of these has come in the form of a concerted attack on its traditional application. That application – often called “the liberal education tradition” – has been the focus of a deliberate campaign to destroy it.

The other has been the use of the term for propaganda purposes. The word “education” carries with it an implication of positive value. Almost anyone with a learning agenda these days – who wants other people to learn something or even just believe something – slaps the word “education” on it to capture some of that traditional approval that the word carries with it – instead of calling it the “training” or “teaching” or “advertising” or “information” or “policy promotion” or “propaganda” that it really is. Trading on the the important meanings of words that refer to things we have traditionally considered valuable is, of course, a standard tool of persuasion and propaganda.

But education isn’t just about our jobs, or our fitness, or our diet, or our parenting, or our driving, or our insurance. It is about who we are, and who we might become, and how much of our own say we are to have in that, right from the nature of ourselves; as if, in the end, it is each one of us that really matters.

That is the big thing that this site is about. It is about renewing the idea of education for our day, so that it can stand up to those who would destroy what it really should mean to us, or those who treat it all too casually. It is about rebuilding the respect for human worth that “education” truly involves. It is about the single most important thing that we can do that will give us power over our own lives, and the power to construct lives that are truly our own and that really matter to each one of us. To you.