[starbox id=RGO]
And so we begin – the purpose of education
Here we will renew the purpose of education for our day. Its purpose should flow from the value of learners themselves – from what we owe to them because of their value, and from what learners owe to themselves as intrinsically worthwhile human beings. Where education is concerned that value lies in their ability to live good lives, and they are owed the development of that capacity, through education, so far as learning has any role in that. This means, in our day, to equip them to resolve the nature of their own good lives for themselves in the best, most intelligent way that we can enable them to do so. Since their abilities to think, to feel, to act and to make what they can of their experience is primary to the good that they can achieve for themselves, it is perhaps trivial to note that educationi one of the most, if not in fact the most important enterprise in which people can engage.
Such a purpose truly does put the learner first. Though it is common enough to announce that the learner should be put first, this is almost impossible to do under the conditions of contemporary, universal, compulsory schooling, and hence this the expression becomes a mere platitude that mostly serves as a self-righteous smoke-screen for the many ways in which learners are being exploited, manipulated and (definitely) dumbed down.
It is very difficult to see this hypocrisy, to gauge its extent and depth for four reasons.
- We take conventional schooling for granted, particularly because we took it for granted when we spent twelve to seventeen years working our way through the system and adapting to it.
- We are largely unaware of the vast body of damning criticism of our conventional educational institutions. To the extent that we are aware at all, we choose not to be too aware, because “after all, there is little that can be done about it, and anyway we need those credentials they offer in order to get ahead in life.”
- Talk about education itself – what education really should be about – is dying in our culture. We don’t go there because nobody else does. If it was important, our leaders, would be talking about it, just as our teachers would have told us about it.
- We take the whole idea of valuing others and ourselves as self-evident. We don’t even want to face the fact that it might be a difficult thing to do that requires a good deal of knowledge and insight. We surround ourselves with a fog of excuses and ways of passing the responsibility for our respect back onto the person we should be respecting. In our own case we learn not to take ourselves or our lives too seriously.
I don’t know of any resource that seriously attempts to open these issues up – except here
As I start this blog, the first of my books, What is Education?, is in the late stages of development. I hope that it will not be too long before the editorial stage, and then the production process.
This blog will, however, be a kind of workbench for this and subsequent writings. I will post pieces of the books as I try out and explore various ideas. I hope, in time, readers will come to comment on these pieces, so that I can improve on them, and also to discuss things that people might want to raise with me, but which may not find their way into the books. This work will be so much better the more collaborative it become.
I look forward to hearing from you
