What is Education?

Interestingly enough, the question of the One and the Many often leads toward the question of how we are to educate the youth.

But what does it mean to educate? At the time when the gigantomachia (battle of giants) was being waged philosophically, education was paediea (cultivating excellence). Granted, that is a loaded idea, though at least the Greeks took a stand on what it meant to educate. Today, we no longer question education, simply how to train individuals in particular forms of thinking. Perhaps that is excellence? How are we to know?

This I do know. Tuition is going up while Humanities courses are being cut. Business courses and the sciences lose few if any instructors/courses when compared to the "uselessness" of the Humanities courses such as History, Religious Studies, Philosophy, etc. So they will argue your education is simply being streamlined to serve your needs; hence the tuition increase.

So education is training. Correct?

Do we need a beginning?

Does the universe need a beginning? When we are taught about the Big Bang the first premise reads "we are reasonably certain that the universe had a beginning." Reasonably certain? What does that mean exactly? Does the universe even need a beginning? And if it does, why did it begin?

Not a new question. In fact, it reflects the philosophical question of western philosophy: why is there something rather than nothing? But what is a beginning?