According to Alfie Kohn, beyond proclaiming “Pass this standardized test or you don’t graduate,” most states now issue long lists of curriculum standards, containing hundreds of facts, skills, and subskills that all students are expected to master at a given grade level and for a given subject. These standards are not guidelines but mandates to which teachers are supposed to “align” their instruction. In effect, a Core Knowledge model, with its implication of students as interchangeable receptacles into which knowledge is poured, has become the law of the land in many places.
Surely even defenders of this approach can appreciate the difference between arguing in its behalf and requiring that every school adopt it. In asking what it means to be well-educated, we should inquire into the qualities of a school likely to offer a good education. The best sort of schooling is organized around problems, projects, and questions – as opposed to facts, skills, and disciplines. Knowledge is acquired, of course, but in a context and for a purpose.
The emphasis is not only on depth rather than breadth, but also on discovering ideas rather than on covering a prescribed curriculum.
Teachers are generalists and specialists in a given subject matter. They commonly collaborate to offer interdisciplinary courses that students play an active role in designing. All of this happens in small, democratic schools that are experienced as caring communities. In creating a positive learning climate, teachers should involve the learners. Involvement means allowing the learners to provide input regarding schedules, activities and other events, asking questions and soliciting feedback, brainstorming and encouraging discussions and planning hands-on work, group and individual projects, and classroom activities.
The purpose of education is to enable students to learn for themselves, not to spoon-feed them every fact they will ever need in their lives. Such an attempt is Herculean to the extreme and cannot succeed. Education should encourage students to learn how to make connections between facts, and give them the ability to use this process throughout life. The importance of learning in enabling the individual to put his potentials to optimal use is self-evident. Without education, the training of the human minds is incomplete.
No individual is a human being in the proper sense until he has been educated. Moreover, education makes man a right thinker and a correct decision-maker. It becomes a provider of knowledge from the external world, teaching him to reason, and acquainting him with past history, so that he may be a better judge of the present. Without education, man, as it were, is shut up in a windowless room. With education, he finds himself in a room with all its windows open to the outside world with various opportunities.
Considering the assessments in the schools as primary foundations of being an educated person, these are based on meaningful standards of excellence, standards that may collectively offer the best answer to our original question simply because to meet those criteria is as good a way as any to show that one is well-educated. Any set of intellectual objectives, any description of what it means to think deeply and critically, should be accompanied by a reference to one’s interest or intrinsic motivation to do such thinking.
Dewey reminded us that the goal of education is more education. To be well-educated, then, is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends. Education has no purpose without somewhere to apply it. Words mean nothing without the meaning people put behind them. Numbers and equations are useless until someone uses them to build something. In the end, it doesn’t matter that you knew the name of every country in the world, that you knew how to find x in any equation, or that you knew how to write a correct paragraph.
It’s what you did with the knowledge you received, that you used that knowledge to better yours and other’s lives. Marian Wright Edelman once said. “Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it. ”
References:
Gardner, Howard. “Multiple Intelligences. ” Community Matters. Ed. Marjorie Ford and Elizabeth Schave Sills. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005. W. R. Klemm and J. R. Snell. ‘Enriching Computer-Mediated Group Learning by Coupling Constructivism with Collaborative Learning’, Journal of Instructional Science and Technology, 1, No2 (1996).