“Science Education” or “Mathematics education” are not expressions easy to translate in French; we would prefer to speak of “apprentissage des sciences” ou “apprentissage des mathématiques”, or alternatively of “enseignement des sciences” or “enseignement des mathématiques” but we have the “education physique” which has recently been renamed “Activités physiques et sportives” (APS) after the emergence of the “Sciences et technologies des activités physiques et sportives” (STAPS) as an academic domain. Still we have the “éducation civique” which aims at educating the learner as a citizen, with as an alternative the “instruction civique” which seems more like teaching than educating. This quick sketch of the linguistic context in which we have to communicate, demonstrate that the word “education” is a difficult one, which seems not to translate well in English when we compare the French use of the word with the English use which seems to be a bit larger.

I suspect that the same happens with the German word “bildung”—a word even more complex than “éducation” if one considers the 10 pages it deserves in the “Vocabulaire Européen des philosophies”. I will not here try to summarize the “bildung” section of this dictionnary, but just notice that its connotation is much closer to culture and civilisation, although indeed it is far from being a synonymous of any of them. The distance between “bildung” and “das lernen” or “das unterrichten” appears to be larger than between  “education”, “learning” and “teaching”.

Indeed, this raise a serious question when translating “Artificial Intelligence and Education” and using AI-ED. as a key word in our domain. Not to mention all the key words using the word “education” or one of its versions.

However, John Self acknowledges a difficulty of the same nature, when writing that:

“If a field is to call itself ‘AI in Education’, then it seems necessary for it to say what it considers ‘education’ to be. However, despite its name, AI-ED has never been concerned with education in its broad sense but only with the specific issue of learning. We may believe that the whole purpose of education is to promote learning but in reality the process of education includes many activities only indirectly related to learning, as any textbook or conference on ‘education’ will confirm.

The term ‘education’ is generally taken to mean ‘formal education’, that is ‘paid-for education’, rather than the ‘informal education’ we receive for free from our culture’. There is a nostalgic preference for the latter, with the former being considered to stunt individual learning capabilities. These polemic views will not be our concern. We will be concerned only with the nature and effectiveness of the learning processes.” (Self 1995, p.6)

The best decision may well be to avoid “education” as a key word, or part of a key word in our metadata. Indeed with one exception: AIED…

Self J. (1995) Computational mathetics: towards a science of learning system design . November 1995 draft version (available online at that time, sometimes refered to as Technical Report 96/23, Computer Based Learning Unit, University Leeds)

Cassin B. (ed.) (2004) Vocabulaire Européen des philosophies . Paris: Seuil & Le Robert