Funding. NAPLAN. Phonics. Equity. Teacher training. AI. Insane teacher workloads. How to teach. How to assess students. How to improve results and standards. Education faces huge challenges and the debates about its fundamentals are more bitter than ever, Will Brodie writes.
About the only thing that unites entrenched foes in those debates is the conviction that education is very important, because it shapes the next batch of citizens. Who vote.
These intractable ideological positions determine the policy decisions of senior bureaucrats and politicians.
So, what is education is for, according to these people?
Researcher Luke Zaphir, Researcher at the University of Queensland says the “philosophical framework” of pragmatism underpins the dominant view of education.
“It (education) is a tool to be used to bring about a specific outcome (or set of outcomes). For the most part, this purpose is economic.
“Why go to school? So you can get a job.
“Education benefits you personally because you get to have a job, and it benefits society because you contribute to the overall productivity of the country, as well as paying taxes.”
It’s a strain of thinking he traces back to the “incredibly focused system” of the Ancient Greeks, under which rich males received a complete education that fostered their thinking skills and knowledge of the arts and sciences.
Most of the populace – women, manual workers, and the poor, went without.
Early in the 20th century, John Dewey exemplified new thinking which held that society, not the individual, was responsible for the “fostering the mental attitudes it wished to see in its citizens”, and education should be for “building mentally healthy human beings and fully developed citizens”.
This sentiment found full expression in 1948’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the historic document hammered out by nations of the world in response to the horrors of the Second World War. It held that “education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms”.
Economic or social?
This view is central to the second goal of the 2008 Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians: “All young Australians become successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens”.
(The first goal is “Australian schooling promotes equity and excellence”.)
By contrast, Zaphir quotes the Australian Department of Education mission statement: “By lifting outcomes, the government helps to secure Australia’s economic and social prosperity”.
On the one hand, education, like any other venture, should be held accountable and measured strictly, in search of constant improvements.
Conversely, education should nurture the person and their inherent capabilities and anything else is secondary.
Former principal and Save Our Schools commentator John Frew says making economic competitiveness the priority is a “major impediment” to effective education.
He accepts the necessity of training children for occupations but says the real goals of education are developing a sense of self; social skills; autonomy; and a sense of purpose.
He believes the qualities of the child should be the foundation of education.
By contrast, Kevin Donnelly, writing for The Australian demands a “more market-driven system where schools are pressured to improve”.
Acclaimed educator Sir Ken Robinson, the most watched speaker in TED Conference history, identified education as a “contested concept” like “democracy” and “justice”. That means a definition of it cannot be agreed upon because people hold such contrasting views of it: the word ‘education’ means different things to different people.
Robinson believes education should “enlarge our worldview” and “expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding”.
His core purpose of education breaks down into four basic purposes.
PERSONAL Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them.
CULTURAL Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others.
ECONOMIC Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent.
SOCIAL Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens.
Robinson says the “new and urgent challenge” is to “provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental wellbeing”.
One of the most eloquent statements of that perspective came way back in 1990, when environmental educator David Orr told the graduating class of Arkansas College that “all education is environmental education”. To teach economics, for example, ecology and physics must be considered.
Orr believed the goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one’s person, and knowledge carries with it the responsibility “to see that it is well used in the world”.
He also said, “we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities”.
As an example of this, he discussed how the town near where he grew up was “largely destroyed by corporate decisions to ‘disinvest’ in the economy of the region”.
“In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity on behalf of something called the ‘bottom line’.
“But the bottom line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives.”
Sarah Hopp, the Student Disability and Neurodiversity Manager at the University of London, says teachers are often caught up in “fulfilling the requirements of the curriculum, in meeting targets and ensuring value for money.”
She believes it’s crucial that teachers frequently ask themselves what the purpose of education is “in order to properly understand our ethos and values as educators and determine whether we are living out those values in our daily educational practice”.
“There needs to be a move away from an education system that is based on accountability, surveillance, and perfectionism…
“We tell our students that failure is part of life’s learning journey and to see mistakes as learning experiences, yet we also tell them to strive, through meritocratic contests, for a perfect knowledge that does not exist.
“Similarly, we tell teachers to constantly reflect and not be afraid to experiment with new and dynamic techniques. Yet often education policy holds professionals to account, creating a profession that is fraught with pressure, stress, and anxiety.”
Hopp says we should maintain high expectations of ourselves and our students but if we prioritise human relationships, we’re more likely to “fulfil our potential, to flourish and to become truly ‘educated’ rather than merely ‘trained’”.
In 2015, the Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker tried to remove words in the state code that command the University of Wisconsin to “search for truth” and “improve the human condition”, replacing them with “meet the state’s workforce needs.”
Walker backed off after intense criticism, but his attempt focused national debate in the US about the purpose of education.
Educator Arthur H. Camins simplified things by saying education “doesn’t have to be either-or”.
“Education should prepare young people for life, work and citizenship.”
Such a balanced viewpoint can seem transgressive in such a polarised policy debate. The sensible middle made radical!
Maybe it offers an example of wisdom emerging from either side of the great divide.
References
https://www.edutopia.org/article/what-education/
https://www.context.org/iclib/ic27/orr/
https://blog.optimus-education.com/what-purpose-education
https://www.worldvision.ca/stories/education/why-is-education-important