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The Goal of Education
The aim of education is “to prepare young people for life.” What is this life that we are preparing for?
In standard education, life is implicitly defined as social life, that is, the young students are being prepared to adapt to society. The values, habits, attitudes, and skills being inculcated are those that are approved by current society. Five centuries ago, these values would be different.
Today’s colleges for example, place an inordinate proportion of the curriculum to subjects that are meant to heighten one’s skill for a certain profession, such as marketing, financing, banking, or computer science. The implied message is that the aim of college education is to “succeed” in one’s career. As a result, the meaning of life of the individual is frequently defined in terms of one’s career.
This assumption that life is to be defined in terms of social values is both superficial and short-termed.
It is superficial because human life is more than social life. It is also about relationships, joy, sorrow, meaning, love, harmony, contentment, and spirituality.
It is short-termed because it does not consider the larger purpose of human life. Human life has a metaphysical or transcendent aspect that goes beyond the changing values of society. Because educators, philosophers and religious people cannot agree about this purpose, this aspect has generally been relegated as secondary among public and secular institutions. In some religious schools, this perceived purpose has been translated in a dogmatic and unhealthy manner that makes people fearful, superstitious, and sometimes irrational.
Preparation for life must embody a view that is both commonsensical and profound, based on the accumulated wisdom of humanity.
Here are some thoughts on what we are preparing for:
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An individual who is able to achieve most if not all of the above would be a fulfilled human being. We can hardly ask for more. To realize the above potentials is the highest goal of education.
In the light of the above, much of modern education is a failure, both in the so-called developed as well as the developing countries. In the developed countries, we find a high level of stress, anxiety, alienation, divorce, etc., as well as high incidence of crime, drugs, and suicide. In the developing countries, there is a high degree of injustice, corruption, insecurity, inequality of income, illiteracy, and social superstitions.
The goal of many progressive schools and alternative education methods is to correct the present imbalance of school curricula, as well as to provide an environment that will nurture wholesomeness of character in the individual. They avoid the many harmful methods that characterize many of our modern schools, such as competitiveness, use of grades in the measurement of competence, and the use of fear and coercion in motivating students to study.
A Preparation for Life
Formal education, then, is a systematic preparation for life.
An “uneducated” person will have to find out the solutions to the puzzles and difficulties in life by trial and error, and will have to depend upon his native intelligence, resourcefulness, endurance, etc. An “educated person,” however, is exposed to an educational environment that provides a systematic and accelerated way in which these lessons are learned beforehand, thus lessening the chances of pain and suffering when facing life as an adult.
Good education therefore is one that will prepare a person to face life in its totality, contributing to the happiness and fulfillment of the individual, whereas poor education essentially fails in this task.
Education involves at least three aspects:
Integrated understanding of life. Good education provides an adequate and balanced map of reality that addresses significant facets of life and nature that affect one’s happiness and meaning of life. At present, the general maps of reality given by schools are based on a popular understanding of life, which in the long run fails in many significant ways, both for the individual and for society. For the individual, it results in unhappiness. For society, it leads to insecurity, destruction, conflict, and war. Society’s popular maps are characterized by serious internal contradictions. They teach honesty, and at the same time teach that honesty is impractical. They teach love, but at the same time view genuine love as too idealistic.
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Development of sound character. Dealing with life involves the development of certain qualities, such as perseverance, kindness, absence of fear, sense of justice, truthfulness, etc. that harmonize one’s nature with reality. Character development includes a clarity of values, on what is right and wrong, on what is more important and less, and the ability to act in accordance with such a hierarchy. In its loftiest levels, good education will include the nurturing of the transcendent life.
Acquiring of life-skills. By life-skills we refer to capabilities that will address the demands of life in current society. Thus certain levels of knowledge on language, computers, commerce, politics, etc., are needed for an individual to function well in present society. Those who do not acquire such knowledge will tend to be relegated to job functions that are basic, such as manual labor, and may feel a sense of unfulfillment in life.
Generally, standard schools all over the world focus mainly on the third need – to be able to cope with the demands of society: earning a living, becoming well-informed about history and current events, acquiring current social values, etc.
This third aspect, while important, does not result in deep fulfillment in life. Success in it may provide satisfaction, but not necessarily happiness and meaningfulness. This third aspect also tends to wrap the individual in the cocoon of current social values, blind to the larger picture of what life and existence is all about.
The task of the educator then is to formulate a program that will meet the above three needs. A school that merely satisfies the third need will be nurturing young people who will likely encounter insurmountable walls later in life when their life-skills are not adequate to meet deeper issues such as happiness, effective relationship, self-mastery, or spirituality.
Integrated Understanding of Life
Children learn about life and its rules through exposure to, and interaction with, people and environment. Their inherent or instinctive reaction to such exposure results in the formation of their personality. Examples of such inherent reaction pattern would be pain avoidance, curiosity, tendency to repeat pleasure, instinct for survival, fear, need for security, need for approval, etc.
Exposure automatically develops a worldview in the child, and this worldview is his or her understanding of what life is. It is not consciously formulated, but unconsciously formed. Thus, for instance, becoming a bully is an unconscious reaction to insecurity – the need to assert oneself through aggression in the face of perceived threats to oneself.
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One’s worldview therefore is but an amalgamation of distinct and disparate learned reactions to environmental situations and pressures.
Schools tend to perpetuate this lack of integration and the failure to review the validity of the worldview or its parts. This is due to a number of factors.
The adults themselves (teachers and administrators) harbor the same contradictory elements in their worldviews that they do not consider these as unusual or abnormal. Thus, the contradiction between “Honesty is the best policy” and “Honesty is often impractical” is left unresolved. The contradiction between the virtue of love and the justifications for anger is left unresolved. That God is omniscient does not appear to them as inconsistent with the Old Testament teachings that God seemed not to have known, and was surprised, that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, or that God regrets having done something.
The ability to review or question the validity of a statement or a presumed fact is a sign of intelligence. The standard school system often does not encourage this because it is too troublesome to have to explain everything to students. Besides, many teachers often do not know the answers, and get irritated when they are asked questions they cannot answer. They often resort to the power of their authority to inhibit such questionings.
A typical teacher would get irritated if asked, “Teacher, why do I have to study how to solve square roots?” or “Why do we have to memorize the capital cities of the provinces?”
It is easier to require children to do a certain assignment, than to motivate them to be interested in doing the assignment.
For this reason it is important for a school to have teachers who are psychologically active, creative and “free.” They themselves are not afraid to question things and hence tend to integrate their own understanding of life. They are willing to reject beliefs that are inconsistent with validated views of life. The religious aspect of this inquiry will be discussed under “Religious Education.”
Character Building
The ability to face the challenges of life entails the development of certain character qualities, such as one-pointedness, self-mastery, absence of fear, respectfulness, friendliness, etc. It also entails clarity in one’s ethical views and a willingness to practice them in life.
The home and the school environment are the primary training grounds for character. It is not so much taught, as learned from example.
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Learning Life Skills
Skills differ from character and worldviews. While character is quite universal in nature, skills are often dependent upon culture, social convention and the prevalent technology. The need to learn computers has emerged only in the past decade or so. A generation ago it was not a significant subject. What was once a luxury has now become a necessary skill that students need to learn. A “good” school is one that is able to adequately prepare young people to acquire these skills such that they become effective in their chosen career or life work.
A wholesome school then must also be able to prepare students to meet the demands of an adult life in terms, such as career, hobby, social skills, and other similar capabilities.