To begin, education must be defined as a category in the strong sense. Without a strong definition, education is reduced to morality, custom, policy or social adaptation.
It is also necessary to clarify that education does not coincide with the effect of the transitive act of educating: I educate you. Education does not depend on an educating agent: it can be self-produced, self-imparted or emerge spontaneously from experience.
The intentionality of the act is not a necessary condition of the educational outcome.
Strong definition
Education is a structural transformation of a subject’s capacity for judgement over time, a transformation that produces, in the subject, an increase in cognitive autonomy, discriminatory subtlety and the capacity to restructure their own interpretative frameworks.
In other words, education expands the space of the thinkable: it increases the capacity to distinguish (not merely to execute), makes previously opaque differences visible, and enables previously unavailable inferences.
The trace it leaves is stable and is not exhausted in the moment of the act.
Corollary of the educational act
An act is educational not by virtue of its intention, tone or moral content, but by virtue of its cognitive effect. This follows directly from the definition: if education is a transformation of the capacity for judgement, what matters is not the agent’s intention but the restructuring produced in the subject.
Criterion for verifying the educational act
The discriminating question is this: after this act, does the subject have access to new cognitive criteria? can they think things they could not have thought before?
Not in the sense of merely substituting content, but in the sense of expanding the space of thinkable alternatives and the capacity to revise, suspend or reformulate their own judgements.
Sociological dimension
All actual education takes place within a spirit of the age, a normative system (laws, institutions), a shared or dominant morality and social expectations of appropriateness. These elements are relevant to understanding what is recognised as educational in a given historical context.
It remains essential, however, to maintain the conceptual distinction: without a structural transformation of the capacity for judgement, there is no education, but rather moral conformity, adaptation or training.
Concluding distinction
Educational in the structural sense: concerns the transformation of the subject, their capacity for judgement and their cognitive autonomy.
Educational in the social sense: concerns the recognition of that transformation when it is compatible with the prevailing symbolic and normative order.
A transformation can be structurally educational without being socially recognised as such, and vice versa.
The two levels may not coincide, even if things are easier for everyone when they do.