If we had a free market in education, we wouldn’t need a “national debate.” Each customer could decide for himself what education he valued and why.
This question is posed in Education 101. Education is to:
(1) Prepare a person for informed living.
(2) Prepare a person for a livelihood.
(3) Prepare a person for self-realization
Unfortunately, American higher education doesn’t do such a great job in terms of (1) and (2) and has very little to do with (3) if a person knows what rings their bell.
The real goal of education should be to teach students how to think.
Very well said.
I was fortunate enough to have a classical education, in the best sense, back in the 50s when some of the prep schools still offered that.
John Dewey had already tossed a monkey wrench into the public schools, but some of the old ways still survived.
No longer.
“The primary job of every Christian educator, regardless of grade level or subject matter, is to shape the heart. We should begin by warning students about the subtleties of pride in both its forms, arrogance and despair. We must teach them to think less of their own abilities and more of God’s. It will be difficult, but it is even more central to the goals of classical Christian teaching than the Trivium or the Great Books. The only way we can accomplish our task as educators is to demonstrate with our own lives that a truly successful life is one in which God is glorified for His faithfulness and love regardless of our personal performance.” - Brian Douglas
This was on posted on freerepublic a few days back in case you missed it.
http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2012/11/five-temptations-for-classical-christian-education
This implied the classical Liberal Arts model of education as opposed to mere training-- its goal being to produce citizens who "could discern for themselves what is Good, True, and Beautiful."
The Founders knew full well that low information voters would not be able to "keep the Republic," as Franklin put it outside Constitution Hall. We are in imminent danger of proving him right.
I am quite fond of the purpose of education as described by John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford in 1914: “Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.”
By that standard, American education is a dismal failure.
Watch the movie RIDE WITH THE DEVIL. One of the Southern supporters in the movie talks about how the North will win because the first thing they put in every village is a public school.
The purpose of an education is to make better citizens. You train people for jobs. You educate people to have better citizens.
Our public education system would make the Soviets proud. They use cookie cutters.
“You will learn this now.”
Doesn’t matter if the child has developed enough to absorb the instruction. And they reward the best parrots.
“It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that, too, of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan.” —Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1786.
“The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.” —Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779.”
As a history teacher, I’ve let this be the guide for what I am supposed to be doing.