Defining Education
This was an assignment, but I am going to be posting my writing (regardless of the initial purpose) to the blog, serving a dual purpose, as a place to gather my reflections in one place, creating a collection of thoughts for me to build upon.
General knowledge is essential, but not enough. It is not enough to possess the ability to recall facts and calculate figures; to understand grammar, sentence structure and prose, yet remain unable to comprehend the intricate detail of a poem or experience the power of an author to lure you in to their story. Education should be focused on the process of acquiring information and the skills necessary to take information, connect it to other information, develop new thought, experience wonder and excitement and feel the power of the connections across all disciplines. Teachers need to be facilitators for this educational journey. They should be there to guide individual students in the various ways to discover and acquire knowledge. The following quotes from Whitehead and Hook most closely capture my developing definition of education:
Education is the ability to develop a purpose for learning based on individual capacity. Individualized education where every child learns what he/she needs to learn. What they learn is determined by interest, ability, skills, goals, motivation, and intellectual maturity. (Hook, 1959)
What education has to impart is an intimate sense for the power of ideas, for the beauty of ideas, and for the structure of ideas, together with a particular body of knowledge which has peculiar reference to the life of the being possessing it. (Whitehead, 1959)
The individual nature of the human being and our ability to respond to our environment in a variety of ways calls for an educational system that celebrates individuality, yet creates a learning community that builds its strength from the sociocultural interactions among the members of the community. A system based on a set “one-size-fits-all” standardized curriculum limits the capacity for learning.
As human beings, the more we learn, the more we want to learn. In thinking about the most important purpose in compulsory education, I believe focusing on an educational experience that is tailored to the needs of individual students would likely result in a educational journey that instills the love of learning in all of our children, cultivating a intrinsic drive that would essentially create life-long learners. All of the other purposes for compulsory education discussed in class, including, employment preparation, citizenship, critical thinking, educational advancement, social justice, character education and advancing the human project, would all come to fruition as a result of schooling that encouraged and supported the notion of learning to learn. The vast kaleidoscope of knowledge and information that exists needs to be turned, twisted, probed and prodded
in order to develop new ways to see and experience our environment.
1XYZZY
wrote on 2 October 2009 at 5:52
Yet, given the history of public education in the United States, and its staggering ability to take terrific ideas and warp them (cf. J. Dewey) within the confines of the industrialized structure we call “school,” how do we avoid making something that sounds so appealing like “individually tailored education” into a simple variant of the “one-size-fits-all” curriculum?
For an example of how this was done in the past with a similar construct, consider the ways in which “accommodations” are currently conceived of by teachers and enacted in their classroom practices. Originally conceived of as a means for connecting students’ educational needs with instructional practices, the word “accommodations” is now frequently (in the eyes of teachers) synonymous with a trite, routinized laundry list of particular hoop-jumpings required by an overseeing bureaucracy.
So, in the service of finding better ways to “individualize” the curriculum (or instruction), we simply find more nuanced ways to mechanize our practices — add another level to the flow chart of teaching decisions and actions. The humanistic urge that you seem to suggest in your post becomes another gear in the machine.