What is "education" ?

I ask this in the wake of a what appears to be somewhat superficial controversy elsewhere about the merits of "public" versus "home education". In my view, a working definition of education includes the major factor of providing the individual with the skills to engage as a valued member of an evolving society. A major factor in that evolution (in the so-call Developed World) is that low level mental tasks such as calculation, and the search procedures for "information" have been facilitated by computers. The question therefore arises as to whether the average individual has "the brains" to deal with that residue of tasks we might call "higher level processing" (including "thinking outside the box"), or indeed whether the subjective nature of "information" per se can be usefully handled or adequately taught.