Saturday 15 March 2014

What is Education For?

It struck me that in "Western" society we have lost all direction. We no longer think about a good life, we just think of a life full of things. We have become obsessed with stuff and we have forgotten about happiness, except to think that more stuff will make us happier. Only when we know what we want can we use education to help give everyone what they want.

So if we don't know what we want, what perhaps do we value. We value experiences, perhaps even more than stuff. So is education fundamentally about experiences?

Could we define education as giving you access to experiences, or as something that enables you to have experiences? If you cannot read, then you cannot share the experiences of all those others who have written their experiences down. So perhaps literacy is fundamental to education and governments certainly make it one of the core targets. Being able to express your experiences and share those of others means that education certainly depends on being able to teach people to express themselves.

What about other skills such as the practical and vocational? If I am to experience what it is like to be a concert pianist then my education has to enable me to have that experience. I need to train until I reach the level where that performance becomes a possibility. If I want to understand advanced level mathematics then I have to share the experiences of all the mathematicians that have played a part in developing that theory. I have to be given the tools to access that experience.

There is also an indirect effect on the experiences that I have access to which relates to our excessive materialism and our focus on earning power as a product of education. That is we need money to access some experiences. I need to be able to pay to fly around the world and see different cultures, or to go skiing or to see the opera. But there is then the question of how this vocational push to education should be balanced.

So perhaps this is a good model of what education should be for. The question then becomes what should be core to education. What does everyone need to be able to experience the world and what parts of education are specific to the individual. Literacy and communication are possibly the essentials, along with some basic maths to make everyday life easier (adding and multiplying, areas and volumes but not much else). Then there is a place for art and literature, history, philosophy and technology and some guiding points of science and politics. But this would be an education focused on the experiences that the individual wants to access. It would be life-long learning as we change where we want to be and what we want to do. Perhaps this would be real education.

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