Education is the development of individuals' capacity to be productive members of society, by teaching and learning specific knowledge, beliefs, and skills. Informally, it is the process of embibing knowledge of numbers and language that are taught by parents and other members of the student's culture and about the functioning of surrounding objects.
It is widely accepted that the process of education begins at birth and continues throughout life. Some believe that education begins even earlier than this, as evidenced by some parents' playing music or reading to the baby in the hope it will influence the child's development.
Education is often used to refer to formal education (see below). However, it covers a range of experiences, from formal learning to the building of understanding and knowledge through day to day experiences. Ultimately, all that we experience serves as a form of education. A teacher should have a firm grasp of a given knowledge area so that they can pass it on to their students using whatever techniques work. Different people learn in different ways and many things will have to be explained many different times in many different ways before most of the students "gets it". Some students, unfortunately, never will "get it"--since they are not interested or have not learned enough of the foundation knowledge of a given subject to advance to a new level. The main role of a teacher is to teach the student the core knowledge accumulated over centuries of human experience well enough that they understood and retain enough of this knowledge so that they can continue to build on it and, at least in part, understand how the world works.
Individuals receive informal education from a variety of sources. Family members, peers, books and mass media have a strong influence on the informal education of the individual.