We don't need no education.

Recently, I have been thinking about the purpose of education in society both as part of a working group on teaching and learning at my present school and also in discussions with British educationalist Briar Lipson after reading her article on the skills vs content debate. The latter is an illustration of an age-old contention point amongst educators for thousands of years, as pointed out by a great blog post by Danielle Myburgh (can't wait to read your thesis!).

Before governments, parents, teachers, and learners had grappled with the point of school, philosophers as diverse as Aristotle, Rousseau and Confucious had written on the role of education (Noddings, 1995; Reed & Johnson, 1996). These early thinkers had varying perspectives on what education should be about, based on their own unique cultural and historical backgrounds.

In the 20th century, educational philosophy became dominated by the likes of John Dewey and George Counts both advocating a more skills-based curriculum. Dewey argued that the primary purpose of education is not so much to prepare learners for the future, but to provide them with the skills to succeed in their current environment. By contrast, Counts critiqued Dewey’s philosophy stating:

 “the weakness of progressive education thus lies in the fact that it has elaborated no theory of social welfare, unless it be that of anarchy or extreme individualism” 

In Count's view, the purpose of schooling was less about preparing independent learners and more about preparing learners to contribute to society. In other words, Counts felt the role of schooling was to equip learners with the skills necessary to participate in the socially and to become change agents in society.

Later, philosopher Mortimore Adler put forth the Paideia Proposal (Adler, 1982) which synthesized the ideas of Dewey and Count. Specifically, Adler suggested that there are three objectives of education:

• Socialisation imparting the norms of a society.
• Subjectification creating independent thinkers.
• Qualification giving set knowledge for a set goal (in particular, employment).

This idea has been further extended by David Tyack. Tyack has argued that from a historical perspective, the purpose of education has always been linked to social and economic needs (Tyack, 1988). Sociologists have further argued that schools exist primarily to serve to provide learners the credentials to contribute to society (Labaree, 1997). Expanding on the pragmatic purpose of school, deMarrais and LeCompte (1995) outlined four major purposes of schooling that include:

• The development of subject-specific skills.
• Assimilation into society.
• Preparation for employment.
• Development of social and moral responsibility.

So now we have defined the core purposes of education as they have evolved over the last 3000 years. The problem now lies in our definitions of educational “success” related to these purposes. As success for a teacher may not be seen as a success for a parent or a government official. There is not a shared understanding of what is most important for parents, teachers, students, and governments. Without this shared understanding of what success actually looks like, it is impossible to actually action what should go on in the classroom.

In the last 40 years, governments of Western democracies have tended to define the success of an education system primarily in economic terms. This has been done in part through international and domestic test rankings of schools. Although initially appealing as a simple easily obtained measure, I do think that it is counterproductive to define our education systems in this way.

So let us take a step back and look at how we are faring as a society and where we want learners and their education to fit in.

Since World War II as a whole, we have become economically richer but global depression and suicide rates have increased (Bertolote & Fleischmann, 2015) have increased.

While the reasons for these worrying statistics are many and complex, what we can say is this: never before have our learners been bombarded with so much information from so many different sources. Whilst the modern age has brought many advantages and technological benefits, it has also created a multi-leveled and complex society of fake news and partisan communication.

At the moment, the policy debates center around raising literacy or numeracy or getting more laptops into schools. One question we have to ask is are these our biggest problems? Why aren’t we instead, focusing more on developing classrooms that nurture young people to be happy, healthy and more socially active citizens?

A meta-analysis from Australia of well-being education interventions is quite clear: such education practices do make for not only happier and more well-adjusted learners but also better academic outcomes in the long term. Yet the drive is still to focus on academic results rather than on the learner as a person first then someone who we can teach second.

In an education system based on a rationalist economic environment, our focus slides from quality to quantity where public school league tables and global PISA rankings inadvertently push teachers to focus on measurable outcomes rather than teaching learners to become whole human beings – something that cannot be captured in a standardized test.

Yet how is values education going to be sustained when its outcomes cannot be measured by ticking boxes? The answer is they cannot and that is what we are seeing on the whole in global education.

Oscar Wilde once said that common sense is not that common. But I would argue that there are ways to foster common sense, and there are ways to inhibit it. I think it would be common sense to look to countries like Norway, for example, who have had social and whole person-centered values embedded in their societal and educational structures for a long time. The Nordic countries are consistently reported as one of the happiest as well as one of the most prosperous groups of countries in the world.

Instead, we have adopted or are flirting with the ideas of an already failed model, based on the individual, success based on narrow academic achievement, and a rationalistic-economic view of life that is not fulfilling if we think about it. If we reflect and do indeed think about it, we may, initially, emerge blinking from Plato’s cave, unaccustomed to the light, but we will, over time, see a better and more humane vision for education and our future.

References

Adler, M. J. (1982). The Paidea proposal: An educational manifesto. New York: Collier Macmillan.

Bertolote, J. M., & Fleischmann, A. (2015). A global perspective on the epidemiology of suicide. Suicidology, 7(2).

Counts, G. S. (1978). Dare the schools to build a new social order?Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

deMarrais, K. B., & LeCompte, M. D. (1995). The way schools work. A sociological analysis of education (2nd ed.). White Plains, NY: Longman Publishers.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Labaree, D. F. (1997). How to succeed in school without really learning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Noddings, N. (1995). Philosophy of education. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Reed, R. F., & Johnson, T. W. (Eds.). (1996). Philosophical documents in education. White Plains, NY: Longman Publishers, Inc.

Tyack, D. B. (1988). Ways of seeing: An essay on the history of compulsory schooling. In R. M. Jaeger (Ed.), Complementary methods for research in education (pp. 24-59). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.