Education
Education encompasses teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, good judgement and wisdom. Education has as one of its fundamental goals the imparting of culture from generation to generation (see socialization).
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Overview
The education of an individual human begins at birth and continues throughout life. (Some believe that education begins even before birth, as evidenced by some parents' playing music or reading to the baby in the womb in the hope it will influence the child's development.) For some, the struggles and triumphs of daily life provide far more instruction than does formal schooling (thus Mark Twain's admonition to "never let school interfere with your education"). Family members may have a profound educational effect — often more profound than they realize — though family teaching may function very informally.
The origins of the word "education" reveal one theory of its function: the Latin educare comes from roots suggesting a "leading out" or "leading forth", with possible implications of developing innate abilities and of expanding horizons.
Formal education occurs when society or a group or an individual sets up a curriculum to educate people, usually the young. Formal education can become systematic and thorough, but its sponsor may seek selfish advantages when shaping impressionable young scholars.
Life-long or adult education has become widespread. Lending libraries provide inexpensive informal access to books and other self-instructional materials. Many adults have given up the notion that only children belong "in school". Many adults enroll in post-secondary education schools, both part-time and full-time, which often classify them as "non-traditional students" in order to distinguish them administratively from young adults entering directly from high school.
Computers have become an increasingly influential factor in education, both as a tool for online education (a type of distance education) and e-Learning. By this approach, individual students can access lessons and materials easily via the Internet and CD-ROM and participate in a range of online learning activities.
History of education
Education has been around for most of human history. Animals that are taught by parents also have some of their actions driven by instinct. Humans however, when they started developing tools and knowledge that had to be taught is considered an education.
Education, to put it simply is the teaching of ideas, abilities, principles etc.
If we think of education as part of the cultural evolution of human beings, this means there has been always some sort of education. The first chair of pedagogy was founded at the end of the 1770s at the University of Halle, Germany. This quote by Lenzen includes the idea that education as a science cannot be separated from the educational traditions that existed before.
Much education has historically had a religion-based delivery mechanism: priests and monks have long realised the importance of promoting positive virtues in the young. Thus they have conventionally borne the economic costs of founding, maintaining and staffing school systems. In Europe, many of the first Universities have Catholic roots.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau fuelled an influential early-Romanticism reaction to formalised religion-based education at a time when the concept of childhood had started to develop as a distinct aspect of human development.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's Commission of National Education (Polish: Komisja Edukacji Narodowej) formed in 1773 counts as the first Ministry of Education in the history of mankind.
Conventional social history narrates how by about the beginning of the 19th century the industrial revolution promoted a demand for masses of disciplined, inter-changeable workers who possessed at least minimal literacy. In these circumstances the new socially predominant structure, the state, began to mandate and dictate attendance at standardised schools with a state-ordained curriculum. Out of such systems the general and vocational education paths of the 20th century emerged, with increasing economic specialisation demanding increasingly specialised skills from a population which spent correspondingly longer periods in formal education before entering or while engaged in the workforce.
Basic education today is considered those skills that are necessary to function in society.
Recent world-wide educational trends
Overall, illiteracy has greatly decreased in recent years.
Illiteracy and the percentage of populations without any schooling have decreased in the past several decades. For example, the percentage of population without any schooling decreased from 36% in 1960 to 25% in 2000.
Among developing countries, illiteracy and percentages without schooling in 2000 stood at about half the 1970 figures. Among developed countries, illiteracy rates decreased from 6 percent to 1 percent, and percentages without schooling decreased from 5 to 2.
Illiteracy rates in less-developed countries (LDCs) surpassed those of more developed countries (MDCs) by a factor of 10 in 1970, and by a factor of about 20 in 2000. Illiteracy decreased greatly in LDCs, and virtually disappeared in MDCs. Percentages without any schooling showed similar patterns.
Percentages of the population with no schooling varied greatly among LDCs in 2000, from less than 10 percent to over 65 percent. MDCs had much less variation, ranging from less than 2 percent to 17 percent.
Challenges in education
The basis for education is transferring ideas from one person to another, or from one person to a group of others. The main problems then becomes the delivery of that knowledge, what knowledge should be taught, is what you teach relevant and useful to the people, and will they retain that knowledge.
Education in Western society, altough it considers the process that it puts children through as education seems to be a weak form of education. Western schools teach some knowledge that children will retain and use as they grow up. They will remember some of the history taught to them, some ideas, principles, as well as the ability to write, read, and do basic mathematics. However, the system of education is built on testing and sorting of students into different categories, such as percentage or letter based competence reports (90% or A). These tests tell if the students have completed the projects and knowledge tests directly, but do not give a overview of the strengths and weaknesses of a student. Also, this categorization testing may also make students feel less intelligent, when they may just not be interested in learning what school is teaching them.
Albert Einstein, one of the most famous physicist of our time, credited with helping us understand the universe better, was not a model school student. He was uninterested in what was being taught, and he did not attend classes all the time. However, his gifts eventually shone through and added to the sum of human knowledge.
Every child has certain gifts and abilities, but early and later childhood education rarely tries to find out what that may be and help the students develop that. If children are good at something they will excel in that subject, and if they do not, they may not do as well.
This brings us to a major critique of modern western education. It exposes children to a wide variety of disciplines which is good, but subjects are taught, tested, and then the children are generally not required to remember the content from before. Time is always spent in mathematics classes reteaching students the basic concepts they should know from the year before, because students have forgotten most of it.
There are also some dilemas about the teaching of knowledge. Should some knowledge be forgotten? What should be taught, are we better off knowing how to build nuclear bombs, or is it best to let such knowledge be forgotten?
Education should be engaging, children should learn by themselves with guidance and direction being given by teachers, instead of prodding and forcing students to complete assignments. Education should be changed so that there is no 'pass' or 'fail', but specific ability and knowledge tests that will build into a student knowledge that he can use in the future, rather than just testing aptitude of a student.
Education is the imparting of knowledge, not the continous testing of knowledge, it should be about skills that students can recreate for the rest of their life, rather than a mark they can show.
The below should be edited by someone with ideas of how to improve education because it does injustice to say that we are the best that we can be – education as we have it now is better than not having any at all. But it leaves much to be desired.
In well-developed countries
In developed countries, teachers worry little about the process of education because there are set guidelines that they have to follow. A reoccuring problem is the difficulty of keeping students attention and actually teaching them something they will retain throughout life. (see Current issues in teaching). Program Evaluation answers questions such as whether different methods of education (public, private, home, or other schooling) "work", or how to improve education. One example is the Program for International Student Asessment from the OECD.
A difficulty in making decisions on how to educate children is the contradiction between compulsory education and nurturing the concept of personal freedom in Western society]]. This has lead to parents in some countries choosing to home school their children where it is permitted. Another reason for this may also be perceived over-education, as well as the over-emphasis on examination results versus student-driven discovery and exploration of subjects (the sausage machine analogy).
A question studied by educational sociologists is that of the "hidden curriculum" which enforces societal status quo by providing different educations to children of different social classes.
In developing countries
In developing countries, the number and seriousness of the problems faced is naturally greater. People are sometimes unaware of the importance of education, and there is economic pressure from those parents who prioritize their children's making money in the short term over any long-term benefits of education. Teachers are often badly-paid.
A lack of good universities, and a low acceptance rate for good universities is evident in countries with a relatively high population density. In some countries there are uniform, overstructured, inflexible centralized programs from a central agency that regulates all aspects of education.
- Due to globalization, increased pressure on students in curricular activities
- Removal of a certain percentage of students for improvisation of academics (usually practised in schools, after 10th grade)
India however is starting to develop technologies that will skip land based phone and internet lines. Instead, they have launched a special education satellite that can reach more of the country at a greatly reduced cost. There is also an initiative started by AMD and other corporations to develop the $100 dollar computer which should be ready by 2006. This computer will be sold in units of 1 million, and will be assembled in the country where the computer will be used. This will enable poorer countries to give their children a digital education and to close the digital divide across the world.
Prominent educationalists
- F. Matthias Alexander
- Catherine Baker
- Benjamin Bloom
- Garth Boomer
- Jim Cummins
- Obeng de Lawrence
- John Dewey
- Hermann Ebbinghaus
- Moshe Feldenkrais
- Paulo Freire
- Robert M. Gagne
- Howard Gardner
- John Taylor Gatto
- Paul Goodman
- Ivan Illich
- Joseph Lancaster
- Horace Mann
- Maria Montessori
- A.S. Neill
- Seymour Papert
- Helen Parkhurst
- Ivan Pavlov
- Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
- Alec Peterson
- Jean Piaget
- Plato
- Neil Postman
- Emilia Reggio
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- B.F. Skinner
- Gustav Wyneken
- Lev Vygotsky
References
- Brief review of world socio-demographic trends shows world illiteracy trends.
- Siljander, Pauli (2002). Systemaattinen johdatus kasvatustieteeseen. otava. ISBN 951–1–18439–3.
See also
External links
- WikEd is a MediaWiki set up specificially for educators and education research.
- Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Education
- http://www.opencourse.info/
- "The Encyclopedia of Informal Education"
- The Failures of American Education
- The Global Social Change Research Project has links to data about global education trends.
- Education Interfering with Learning
- [1]European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education
Categories: Education