Recently, a university professor
wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. He commented that people
shouldn’t put too much weight on the recently released trends in SRA scores of
the state’s days later, the paper printed a scathing response from a community
member who questioned whether the University really wanted someone on their
staff who didn’t even know the purpose of education. Clearly, this person assumed
that his definition of education was shared by all.
What
is the meaning of education?
Webster defines education as
the process of educating or teaching (now that’s really useful, isn’t it?)
Educate is further defined as “to develop
the knowledge, skill, or character of...” Thus, from these definitions, we
might assume that the purpose of education is to develop the knowledge, skill,
or character of students. Unfortunately, this definition offers little unless
we further define words such as develop,
knowledge, and character.
What
is knowledge?
Is it a body of information that
exists “out there”—apart from the human
thought processes high school
students. The professor went on to describe some of the unanswered questions about
the nature and value of assessment. He mentioned that one of the problems with
assessment was the ongoing disagreement on the very purpose of education. A few
that developed it? If we look at the standards and benchmarks developed by many
states—or at E. D. Hirsch’s list of information needed for Cultural Literacy
(1), we might assume this
definition of knowledge to be correct. However, there is considerable research leading
others to believe that knowledge arises in the mind of an individual when that
person interacts with an idea or experience. This is hardly a new argument. In
ancient Greece, Socrates argued that education was about drawing out what was
already within the student. (As many of you know, the word education comes from the Latin educere meaning “to lead out.”) At the same time, the
Sophists, a group of itinerant teachers, promised to give students the
necessary knowledge and skills to gain positions with the city-state.
There is a dangerous tendency to
assume that when people use the same words, they perceive a situation in the
same way. This is rarely the case. Once one gets beyond a dictionary
definition— a meaning that is often of little practical value—the meaning we
assign to a word is a belief, not an absolute fact. Here are a couple of
examples.
“The central
task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce
not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are
students together.” ~Eric Hoffer
“No one has yet
realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul
of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that
treasure.”~Emma Goldman
“The only
purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing
his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is
theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to
integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge
discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge
by his own effort.” ~Ayn Rand
“The aim of
education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think— rather
to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load
the memory with the thoughts of other men.” ~Bill
Beattie
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any suggestion on my side