Goals and Roles of Education

The school year is approaching so I need to get my head back into the teacher space. If you are in the field of education, then this post might be interesting. If you are not, then you are defining "the field of education" too narrowly and you should read this whether or not it is interesting. Either way, I win, and that's what is important here.

One of my many neuroses is a need to organize ideas into groupings. I also like to be places early and I finish any book I start even if it is horrible. But the main thing is I break ideas down into categories. For some things, this is a well known practice. People often talk about the reasons for the use of jails (in no particular order):

1. Punishment -- you do the crime, you lose the privilege of living with others, or voting, or whatever
2. Deterrence -- others want to avoid this penalty
3. Rehabilitation -- learn to be a better person while in jail
4. Removal -- we have to protect others by removing you

There might be more but you get my point. We can decide if the system "works" only by measuring the end result against the expectations created by our initial goal. If someone isn't rehabilitated but we are safer while he is in jail, then if our goal was #4, then success. If it was #3, then failure.

When it comes to education (as I and others have said) there are also many possible goals. The easiest way to break them down might be

1. To be
2. To do
3. To know

and each of those can be attached to a particular approach to curricular design and instruction: rules-based (civics, how can the student be a more involved member of the society), skills-based (vocational, the goal of teaching is to make sure the student can apply actual skills), classics-based (academia for academia's sake; amassing knowledge is the primary goal of education). Proponents of each can also defend their positions by saying that each one creates the gateway to the others. If I am a more involved person, I can gain skills through being social, and gain knowledge by respecting the canon out there. If I am well-read, then skills can be more easily acquired and I will contribute to society that way. If I have the ability to do something, I will become invested in the world and will want to learn more about it as I succeed. Or something like that.

Now, I know that all three of these approaches are valid and necessary, but when too much stress is put on any one of them, the educational system becomes stilted. For too long, most schools were about knowledge, expecting other things to come out of that. Students who couldn't hack it (in the old way of thinking) were consigned to vocational structured education. And certain more parochial approaches focused on the being and the self. In response, schools have tried to switch things up with more schools including vocational training for all students or using projects to have students apply knowledge and implement it as a skill, or even downplay the knowledge acquisition. Some schools have introduced character building as an essential element of curriculum. Now, this isn't inherently bad because, as with most things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. A good school has to incorporate all of these aspects, trusting the classroom instructor's sense of when each needs to be primary. Unfortunately, we are letting the pendulum swing too freely, and shifting so completely from one exclusive mix to the other extreme that we aren't really solving the underlying need, for an holistic view of student development, needing all these goals all the time. In the same way that we can't focus only on higher order thinking skills and forget about the foundational nature of the lower order ones, we can't ignore the need for frontal teaching when we flip the classroom. Good teaching is student centered even as it keeps the teacher driving content, pace and approach. Good teaching gives students freedom but guides them towards what the expert knows will be most beneficial to them in the long run. You can't just "know" without knowing why. You can't learn to do without understanding when not to do. There is no "being" which isn't grounded in understanding. Nature isn't the only one who abhors a vacuum -- it doesn't work in education either. But it takes a practiced hand to know when each aspect of an educational goal needs stress.

So a student is graduated from the system. Did the system succeed or fail with that student? What was the goal? Does he know more than when he started? Does he care to learn more on his own because he values learning? Can he do any of that learning on his own, or can he apply what he has learned to other contexts? And this measure of success might change student by student (and even for a single student it might shift over time). Looking at short term measures (local summative assessments, external high-stakes testing, admission to the next step of the educational ladder) is a fool's way of deciding if things worked and we know this, but we hang our hats on these metrics anyway.

I don't have the answers -- that's why you are reading this for free on a blog. But I do know that the first step is asking the right questions and clarifying terms and goals so that we can free oursleves up to brainstorming some solutions.