Education is the process of accruing knowledge. This comes in all kinds of different forms, whether the systematic learning that goes on in schools or universities, or the education that happens every day as a person makes his or her way through life.

Education can be learning that the Queen Alexandra's Birdwing is the largest butterfly in the world, or it can be discovering what Brad Pitt has for breakfast. It can be finding out about the latest sim only choices UK or it can be coming to understand Euclid's fifth postulate.

Human beings are addicted to knowledge and understanding. Whatever situation we find ourselves in there is a strong impulse to get to grips with it. How did this thing come to be the way it is and not some other way? Education is simply the formalisation of this natural curiosity.

Throughout human history there has been education. It has existed in the story-tellers of pre-literate societies, in the philosophical schools of classical Greece, in the seminaries, monasteries and universities of medieval Europe, and in the primary schools, high schools, and colleges of our times.

Human beings are weak animals. We have neither the pace of the cheetah nor the strength of the grizzly bear. We cannot climb trees like the chimpanzee, nor can we fly like the eagle. But what puts human beings in such a powerful position in the animal kingdom is the capacity to teach each other and to learn from each other.