Purose of Education??

ok

uk mum wrote:
>
> This is something I’ve been thinking about even before
> I had kids. If education is to prepare kids forthe future
> then what should schools be teaching?? It seems to me thatthe
> only thing we can really know about the future is that it
> will be vastly different and involve rapid change. Yet all
> schooling is geared to the idea that change will come slowly
> and require academic learning. I

Not necessarily. Academic learnign has much value even with many changes. This is not the first time in human history of much change.

just read today about rhesus
> monkeys moving computer cursers with just their
> thoughts…. Surely more important than academic learning
> will be problem-solving, the ability to see the whole
> picture and analyse it then adapt quickly to changing
> circumstances, to understand systems quickly from parts. All
> skills that come naturally to my dyslexic. I wasn’t going to
> have a computer around for my kids because I wanted them to
> read and do things by hand then planned to turn them loose
> on computers when the hormones hit as a balance to the other
> obsession of teenagers. Best laid plans… But it seems to
> me that homeschoolers have this great opportunity to reinvent
> education. My homeschooling mentor had her kids do 4 hours in
> morning - the rest of the day was spent learning “practical
> things”. Bycycle repair, car repair, plumbing, roofing,
> carpentry, as well as swimming, drawing, music etc…
> Just thinking I want tomake this my homeschooling goal rather
> than just getting into college. To prepare for life. Just
> curious as to others thoughts.

This sounds like a great plan. But a real caution — the idea that “you don’t really need to know information, you just need to know where to look it up” is dead wrong. WHen Afghanistan is in the news, you should have some idea where it is. There’s so much of our culture that is based on literature (think of quotes from Shakespeare and the Bible) and we deprive our kids of that depth of knowledge if we skip it.

But a balance… now that’s a good idea :)

I’m not sure how to explain what I mean exactly. By Academic I don’t mean not learning Latin or math or history- but rather sitting at a desk sponging things up and squeeezing it back out on tests. Shouldn’t math be related to what you can do with it? I’m always amazed when my husband scribbles down no’s and comes up with a design he can then build. I was never taught that. And I was bored to tears with math studied to pass tests and prompthy forgot everything.
Just studying the ways to look things up is just as stultifying. No one will bother to look up Afghanistan unless they see a reason to. And that extends to the U.S. State dept. with only 3-4 accessible people who can speak pashtu despite it’s obvious signifigance to anyone who’s been to that part of the world and can think past their noses. I was married in Karachi in 1989. Our reception was at the American Club and attended by a number of self-confessed, white -shoed , vacuum cleaner salesmen who spent most of their days watching CNN at the bar. I’m not sure any of them could point which way Kabul was despite the millions of refugees from there encamped all around them. That’s sort of the practical description of what I mean by Academic learning.

“Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life. (p.148, School Education).”

Are you a poet in your spare time? I can just taste that wedding reception… and that sense that when “education” and “academics” are used to insulate us from the world instead of to get us deeper into the world, we’re doing it all wrong.

You’ve got a good point about the futility of “learning” information only for the purpose of taking tests, but over the last few years of homeschooling I’ve come to a new appreciation of mastering the basics. There’s a lot of emphasis on making education meaningful and engaging students in projects that give them a purpose for doing math problems, or looking up Afghanistan. Unfortunately, this approach often fails to help students actually learn math or geography. Trying to solve a problem which requires math skills that you do not yet possess is usually an exercise in frustration. OTOH, learning a new skill is usually empowering, even if you do not have an immediate need to use the skill. Also, I’ve noticed that once my kids gain confidence with a skill through lessons, they go on to use it in various situations.

I do like practical experience, and our approach is much like your friend’s combination of academics and practical life skills, but we spend a lot more time on activities like learning how to look things up than I thought we would.

Jean

This is an argument that’s been around for a while and that keeps coming back. Let’s the question one level further — what exactly IS the “academic education” you’re talking about?

If you think “academic education” is memorizing lists of facts and spitting them back, then that’s really too bad; that isn’t education, it’s parrot-training. If that’s what you got and what your local schools are doing, that is the problem, not the solution.

If you look at a really good academic education, well, it does exactly what you are trying to do. A good education teaches a person not just to read, but to analyze and criticize what is being read; not just to know historical facts, but to understand the faults of the past and try to avoid them in the future; not just to recite mathematical formulas and shove numbers around, but to solve new problems and to create new mathematical proofs; not just to repeat physics equations and measure chemicals, but to discover new truths about the world.

Three problems with teaching people to question and discover:
You need teachers who themselves have a real mastery of the subject, or at lease well-trained minds themselves, unfortunately less and less true as teachers become more and more bureaucrats.
You need to accept questioning and original ideas from your students, something that is hard for people who are unsure of themselves especially if teachers are poorly educated themselves, very upsetting to bureaucracy, and a problem for some religious groups.
You need a balance between facts and theories, a balance that is never easy and which loses out to fads in schooling.

Your idea of teaching your children to be good people and good citizens first is certainly sound. Don’t give up on the academic side, which can give them something of real value if it is approached as a method of thinking rather than a list of junk to swallow whole.

Actually I spent most of childhood writing poetry. High school guidance counselor said I could never make a living at it. When I met a juggler years later making his living at what the guidance counselor told him should only be a hobbey i felt I’dbeen sold a bill of goods. Anyway kind of dumb topic, I’d just read bernard Cornwall’s Arthurian trilogy. Winter King, Enemy of God, and Excaliber. Penguin press. I highly reccommend it but can’t be responsible for odd moods it might generate. Still think we can’t plan what skills will be needed 20 years on. Not like in Victorian times. New Dark ages coming

I remember finally getting to the classes in history where teachers told you about the people that didn’t make it into the history books. In the “best of times” there were whole populations in dire straits (and they weren’t getting paid to play Sultans of Swing).
Franklin Roosevelt once said “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” At first I thought that was just a way of saying “don’t be afraid, being afraid is your only problem.” Then I reconsidered. Fear that you won’t have enough is what drives people to justify all kinds of injustices and to snipe at their neighbors — and during tough times what makes or breaks a community/society is whether you band together or tear each other apart; whether a tough time is short or turns into a Dark Age. So that “fear” thing is certainly to be feared, and I think it’ll play a part in the days to come. Or not, who knows :)
Cornwall, eh? I’ll have to see if the library carries it…

He may be difficult to find because he only writes for Penguin publishing, Oxfords Publishing house, which many U.S. bookstores don’t really carry. Good insights on the fear part. But I was thinking more on the lines of the loss of reading and books. The dark ages really came with the loss of libraries , the ability to read, do enough mathematics to build… plumbing, how to draw using perspective… All that knowledge disappeared when it was no longer taught and there is no record what happened during that time. It is Dark because there were no books written to illuminate it. The loss of all the accumulated knowledge of the ancient world was due to violence and invasions but finally it was because it was no longer taught from old to young or valued by the young. It seems to me that we are no longer teaching the skills by which the average man could build his own house if he needed to, We’re taught math but disconnected to the reasons why it was originally taught which was to give the average person useful daily skills. The artists who’ve won the Turner Prize for about the last 15 years pride themelves on not being ableto draw. Painting w perspective is no longer taught.
Reading, well we know all about that. But if the future of computers is to be wired into a headset that enables you to move the cursur and work merely by thinking (which is the science fiction prediction for about the last 20 years and now seems to be in the realm of reality with current experiments) then how many of our future generations will read actual books? Libraries already rely on computers instead of the accumulated knowledge available in cardcatalogues -will the future be going and plugging yourself in?
Under the Romans the UK had a level of plumbing unequalled , well still unequalled really-the Italains are really into luxury baths while the Saxons are pretty basic. But no one is studying plumbing, there is such a shortage that a good one can charge £200 an hour in London. But no one wants to learn how to be one. So what I was musing are we losing a body of knowledge,not thru violence but rather dependence on technology. Yes, a lot of it is middleage. I’m as likely to listen to opera as old dance favorites these days. But still I think teaching my son the math necessary to build a house, or a table is as important as how to program a computer and he shows some artistic talent so I’m going to take him to some adult education classes where they actually teach drawing-since the art colleges don’tanymore….

NT