So what is education for?

[creamteas]

Following Elibean suggestion, the question is what is education for?

To me education is about working with children and young people to ensure they can emerge into adulthood with the knowledge necessary for a fulfilling adult life.

I do not believe that the ?banking model?, where skills and instructions are deposited into an empty vessel is a good way to approach learning especially if it is a narrow vision of exams, training and skills.

Education is for the benefit of the individual, of course, but also wider society and involves experiencing and understanding core education values such as critical thinking, experimentation, debate, collaboration and competition in different disciplinary areas.

All children have a right to high quality education which should help them uncover their strengths and weaknesses and help them focus on their talents in whatever sphere it should be.

So what do you think?

Getting a job.
Ideally being a sensible resourceful wise responsible member of society, too.
But getting & keeping a decent (respectable) job, first & foremost.

I can't really connect to all the idealism.

The problem with getting and keeping a job is that some jobs require very specialist skills. If that job then disappears, there are a lot of people left with one very specialist skill which is no longer required, so they need more than just that to fall back on - ie education and learning needs to extend beyond the first job that you get and your basic education behind that first job needs to have been wide enough to give you the tools to be able to look beyond that work if necessary and keep educating yourself (ie it has to give you those wider aspirations and the energy and resilience to achieve it, which you are more likely to have if you actually enjoy the process of learning). Except, as KatyMac points out, some careers or jobs are so incredibly specialised that they are really only open at a high level to those who have taken the risk of devoting their lives to them... but most of these people are fully aware of the risks.

I would say, though, that the schools which fail their students the most are the schools which do not turn out employable people at the end of it.

If communities and families worked a bit harder on the bits I think they should take responsibility for, schools would have an awful lot more time on their hands to think about and deal with the core skills and knowledge required by employers.

Really love Rabbit's take on what education should be, but feel for many of the generation who will be leaving school in the next few years, education will have to be very tailored to simply getting any job.

I think education should ideally be about increasing possibilities: an opportunity to step outside the predetermined limits of wealth, class, sex, race etc

However, a reasonably happy and independent life requires employment to meet even the most basic needs, if our children are unable to support themselves because the jobs aren't there, education then is like buying the party dress but not getting an invite to the actual party.

Still, you can get a small amount of pleasure from the party dress. Better than being naked and cold!

education or schooling?

I am responsible for my child's education - for producing a functioning human being with the social graces, life skills and confidence to make their way in the world.

School gives them structured knowledge - structured in a way that prepares them for future higher level schooling or employment.

The problem is that schools have stopped being schools and started being environments to clean up the mess of some atrocious parenting. Now in part I agree with this because the abused or neglected child needs an escape and a change to break out of the lifestyle he has grown up in but schools cannot do both at this present time and need some serious reform if they are to be all encompassing.

Personally I think schools could achieve more by small classes only teaching maths and English and maybe a language in the mornings and getting the kids out in the afternoon doing team building, leadership, community service. Everything else you can get from books.

And learning could happen in the afternoon sessions but it wouldn't be obvious. Physics in a team building session through trial and error, chemistry in cooking etc.

And, are we talking primary or secondary? Or even pre-school? Because I would guess, from some of the (highly eloquent ) answers here, that may make a difference...

I think that if English, Maths and a language was focussed on to the exclusion of other formal subjects then by the time a pupil was about to enter Y10 they would have such strong core academic skills that studying a selection of subjects - not 12 - for four years from scratch would be easy. After all, GCSE History has to be learnt from scratch anyway as it's got nothing to do with the Egyptians! It would also be very clear by Y10 if a child wanted to follow a vocational route based on their enjoyment and strengths in the afternoon sessions but they would be doing it, not out of failure because or because they weren't academic, but because it was their choice. After all, even the least able would probably be A'level or beyond in English and Maths and a language by Y10 if that's all they had been studying. Children are being given too many subjects and not enough out of the classroom time.

School starts at Chez Colleger next term.

And while I'm at it! There would be less pushiness from parents to get their kids into the appropriate sets because qualifications wouldn't start until Y10.

That sounds kind of fun... Mind you, when you started looking into the details, you would probably want to add more and more until you ended up overcrowding the syllabus again - eg woodwork, music and singing, IT. Would that be included in the afternoon stuff? I think, actually, in a lot of state primaries, there is an awful lot of what they call cross curricular learning rather than sitting down doing one academic subject after another throughout the day as though English and maths actually can be separated from everything else. So, for example, rather than doing the Ancient Egyptians as a discrete subject, they could be setting up a pretend travel company specialising in trips to Egypt, doing internet research to find out about Egypt Ancient and modern so that they can advertise it as a tourist destination, accessing the local library, preparing presentations, doing mock interviews for work as a tour guide at the company, filming their own adverts, learning about food from modern or Ancient Egypt and trying out recipes for themselves, working out the volume of a pyramid and how the stones used to build them could be moved about, how heavy they were, etc. Would this sort of thing be excluded altogether, or another of the less formal afternoon sessions, after a morning of spelling, grammar and punctuation?

I think the afternoon could have music, it, Egyptian travel but in a non examined way and no writing unless the child wanted to write. I'd have areas where kids could choose. Yes, so some may choose to do cooking five days in a row but they'd eventually want to try something else. I think choice makes a child more inquisitive and interested in learning.

You'd probably quite like my dss' primary school! I don't think things tend to be done that way at secondary level at the moment, though...

Colleges, that is exactly how my bog standard comprehensive ran in the 80's. Exactly.

Regular lessons in the morning. Afternoons devoted to all sorts - you signed up for 5 different clubs, which ranged from chess to sailing, to d of e, to cooking, to adventure club, to painting, to, gosh, I don't know. A list of forty or so, I'm guessing however many teachers there were at the time.

Exactly that. A bog standard comprehensive.

Until I started reading a lot of john holt and whatnot, it hadn't occurred to me how truly progressive this was at the time. But then it wouldn't. I was just doing what I was told.

There is no way on this sweet earth that I would ever have taken up sailing without it though. My parents even bought an old wooden dinghy on the back of me learning in one of the afternoon clubs. Good working class types who it would never have occurred to join a freaking sailing club.

The sixth formers also had a camping/ backpacking/ climbing group that was loosely led by the community education guy - we would take off most weekends in the summer to the lake district or dart moor, and climb, and camp, and hike, and swim in the river.

Bog. Standard. Comp.

In the '80's.

I suppose for people who won't likely get or need a job (eg., inherited wealth or learning disorders), then you could say that education is about making responsible and sensible life choices to the best of their ability. Maybe that's a decent broader explanation of the purpose of education, but I think job skills are still vital part of picture.

Of course new job skills & training can always be added later.

I'm really uncomfortable with that, voles.

Dd2 has cerebral palsy - she needed huge support for yr r in communication and mobility, but these days I fully expect her to go to university and lead an absolutely independent life.

To really meet an individual's needs, no sausage factory system of 'this is what the govt thinks you need to know at any one given snapshot of time in history' is ever going to work to enable everyone to meet their potential.

Wealth is similar. Even countries that don't accept individual immigrants with disabilities unless they can afford to pay for their support requirements have been forced to concede that current wealth means feck all, and you could be skint two months down the road.

I'm really uncomfortable with anyone being allocated systems broad brush by virtue of disability or inheritance status.

I think I'm just old and cranky and disillusioned by institutions and govthink wholesale though, so it could just be me...

Sorry I said anything to upset you, Madwoman. I was thinking of much more severe conditions than I think you are thinking of, I was not thinking of every learning disorder everywhere in saying that (some) learning disorders might preclude employment. Does your DD have a severe learning disorder? Just like people with masses of inherited wealth usually choose to have a job or need one, anyway.

I was trying to think of what would be the purpose of education if you confidently felt you weren't going to get a job when you grew up. Thinking my previous post was a bit narrow. So I quickly imagined the sort of situation someone might be in which would lead them to think a job was unlikely. Education still worthwhile for such people (obviously).

It will take me I while to digest the thread properly, and have lots of work that needs to be done tonight, so not got a lot of time, but my brief thoughts are:

The issue about class is still problematic because the educational system is, like wider society, built on a hierarchy of class, so some values/activities/ways of seeing the world are given more status. So to use your example of music classical is seen as more prestigious that pop, they are not seen as cultural equal (regardless of the ticket prices/popularity etc).

Whilst of course education is a preparation for employment in that it is there to develop children, I think the narrow focus on jobs is extremely problematic. I cringe every time the IOD (or similar) make statements about the education system not producing the right skills. This is a particular problem at universities where pedagogical decisions (and sometimes fairness) are being overturned just to ensure students can fill in certain boxes on graduate scheme application forms. The most obvious example is group-work. I never did group-work at uni, and I can work in teams just fine. To have your overall degree result dependent on the work of another group member is not a good educational aim IMO.

I also think that children should not be subject to exams at primary, and making a decision at 12/13 as to what subjects to specialise in is quite frankly ludicrous. The new UTCs are a good example of how not to educate children and this is possibly why so far, they are not very popular.

That's it for me tonight, but look forward to reading more tomorrow!

Oh gosh, no, I'm not upset- I think I was more uncomfortable with the idea that it's possible to judge which camp you fall into at an early enough age to prescribe an educational path - especially with communication issues. I'm particularly thinking of cases where kids don't even get decent communication devices until waaaaaaay too late, and the lack of effort put into aiding communication even now, so you wouldn't even know a child's potential.

I think it would be way too easy to box kids as having little potential and thus writing them off, a cost savings measure to stop you bothering to try everything to find the key to unlock potential. And I know that's not what you meant, but I've witnessed people patting dd2 on the head and mentally writing her off, when she has a higher iq than her paediatrician. Really easy to judge potential erroneously. And I don't blame folk (well, I do, but I blame a society where employers will use every tool in their box to not employ anyone with any sort of disability whatsoever, whatever the law says).

I think I'd rather an unlimited amount of dosh and a vast array of professionals who were trying their damnedest to increase potential, rather than a system which says 'ah, it's okay. They'll never mount to much anyway, so let's make sure we teach him to wash his pants'. Way too easy a get out for the bean counters. I mean, why bother to spend all that money on comms?

Yup, life skills essential. But I don't want that to be the ceiling of what we're striving for in educational terms, for anyone.

I think we're arguing the same thing, really.

Rofl creamteas, you haven't been on one of my group work threads have you?

There were four of us in our group. One dropped dead, one had a severe health emergency and got hospitalised for the entire semester (although kept claiming she was coming back, but then never did), and my remaining colleague needed Valium and vodka to get through any public speaking or presentation, and the stress of the eventual final presentation meant that he was unable to actually do any work. So I did it. I even typed out a highlighted copy of the presentation, so that he could just read the next highlighted bit when I looked at him. He could barely speak.

I am not a fan of group work.

I should add that I had to travel o'seas in the finishing stages to visit docs and a school to persuade them they were willing to take dd2, and so I wrote most of the damned thing on the 9 hour flight back. Slept 2 hours and then got up and went in to try and beef up said colleague who had reached the Valium point.

I hadn't made the connection that it was all to do with team working stats though. V interesting. My 16 years in the military clearly hadn't demonstrated that capacity.

I whole heartedly believe in later-bloomers, too :).

Most of this thread is vastly over my head. I only understand the bits I said about job skills & being sensible & responsible.

I spent yesterday reshelving travel books in a library. Combined with this thread it really makes me want to earn a shed load of money so that I can travel with the dc's for two months every summer hol. I say that because mine aren't even vaguely interested in home ed or unschooling. They want to sit and do as they are told and be told what they need to know to get a sweetie at the end of the day. Tragic. (well, Ds not so much, but he still doesn't want to HE.)

The sad thing is, you don't realise what a lot of old rope school is until waaaaaaay after you have left, and probably have had kids yourself. Schooling is fascinating when viewed from a distance. So much more education out there than that which passes for education from a recognised pov.

The problem with the class issue is that the English exported their elite and their elitist education system throughout the world and it isn't only in the UK in which some values, activities and ways of seeing the world are given more status. You can't easily change the cultural hierarchy within the UK if the rest of the world sits back and laughs at you for even trying, whilst preferring to do business with people who were educated according to elitist norms.