The aims of education and pedagogical belief

Some people might think that discussions of education aims are not very necessary and useful. They prefer talking about what should be taught in school, what helps students learn faster and become successful in the future. They might simply believe that teaching is teacher’s job and learning is student’s responsibility. However, both student and teacher might suffer some unsatisfactory experiences such as struggling in class, feeling bored of school/job, poor outcomes and being stressful. They might feel lost then end up with the question “What am I trying to do?”. The aims would make a significant change in education revolution in terms of the school system, curriculum, teaching and learning method as well as the assessment procedure. It also brings about a lot of benefits for whole society and each of individual. In this blog post, I am going to present some problem with our current education, my thought about education aims, an introduction to neo-liberal education and my own pedagogical beliefs which all closely linked together.

Problem with our current education

In 2015, Eddy Zhong, a successful technology entrepreneur appeared in TEDx Talk with a question “How does school make kids less intelligent?”. He gave out an example, if you ask a 5-year-old boy that “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, he will unhesitatingly say “An astronaut” or “A businessman” but after just 5 to 6 years in the education system, this child has turned into a teenager that has no idea about what he wants to be and just listened to his parents almost 100% of the time. The fact is, there is so much more than just one type of intelligence. While the school can make you more academically intelligent by teaching you physics, algebra, calculus, it is diminishing the children’s creative intelligence. It is teaching them to think in a certain way, to go to a certain path in life by telling them: go to high school, get a diploma, go to a good college, find a stable job, and if you don’t do that, you won’t be successful.

Also, Sir Ken Robinson had a talk in TED (2007) with the same topic. He said “Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they will have a go but by the time they get to be adults, they have become frightened of being wrong”. He believes that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. He pointed out that every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. In addition, there is a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. He emphasised that there isn’t an education system on the planet that teachers dance every day to children as the way we teach them mathematics. Why and why not?

Education aims

Every day children go to school and learn new things. They are supposed to accumulate more and more knowledge and should be getting smarter. How is it possible that school is making them less intelligent and killing their creativity? Obviously, it is not the right purpose of education. So, what are the aims of education? Education can the knowledge accumulated, or that must be accumulated, by students after they study content areas in school. Education can be the development of skills, knowledge, and self-discipline. Education can be the process of cultural transmission. Education can be the development of autonomous and creative thinkers. Education can be the process of preparing students to earn a living.

Education can be any powerful thing that people can think of. However, as Dewey (1916) stated “Education as such has no aims. Only persons, parents and teachers, etc. have aims, not an abstract idea like education” (cited in Bailey, 2006, p. 170). I believe that government, parents, teachers, educators all have the power to influence and inspire children in terms of education.

From an educator’s perspective, the aim of education should be to transmit valuable things, maybe knowledge, history or culture in order to help children understand the world. However, it must be in a morally acceptable way (Peters, 1966).

From Government’s perspective, “one aim of education is to maintain and develop the economic well-being of the individual and society in general (‘Every Child Matters’, 2003). By that definition, we can broaden education meaning from not only about a child, an individual but also about the whole society, a country.

From parent’s perspective, education will develop and prepare children for challenges and opportunities of today and tomorrow (Carter, ASCD)

So, what is the aim of education from children’s eyes? (video) children

I believe that they have no idea. They are simply curious about the world, about a lot of things they do not understand. They simply have a dream of becoming someone or something in the future. They simply are intelligent and creative just the way they are. 

But in fact, there are too many adults who are regularly telling children to go to college, to find a good job, and to be ‘successful’. There are not enough people who are telling them to explore more possibilities, to become who they really want to become. As Dewey recognized that "the conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind" (1916, p.103). The question is, what kind of society we are living in?

A picture of Neo-liberal education

The value of education, which we are educated in, is defined by how well it enables the country to compete in the global marketplace. The countries compete each other on PISA scores, the university league tables and rankings. Schools become more like companies and parents become consumers. Neoliberal education does not focus on schools collaborating to improve learning quality for all students. Instead, schools compete against each other for reputation. Schools have also become increasingly standardised. This leads to the rise of standardised testing to measure effectiveness and progress. As a result, everyone has to learn the same thing at the same time. Curriculum is also narrowed to make standardisation easier to implement and the arts and humanities are often cut to make room for teaching to the test.

In addition, teachers are greatly impacted by neoliberalism. Teachers are in control of learning and as a result, the pressure is placed upon them to make achievements because they have to teach to the test they’re given, they have little or no freedom to control their classrooms or curriculum, they have little or no freedom to explore new pedagogy. Almost everything they do is follow the guidance of the neoliberal state.

On the other hands, perhaps the people who suffer the most in neoliberal education are the children themselves. They feel powerless trapped in a system where they feel like they have to accept anything they are given. Things like creativity, intelligence and imagination are suppressed and students are forced to fit into moulds that ignore their unique backgrounds and personalities and instead try to make them all the same.

So, what is the alternative to Neoliberal Education?

Pedagogical belief

In 2012, Noam Chomsky presented “The purpose of Education” at the Learning Without Frontiers conference in London. He stated that “Education is really aimed at helping students get to the point where they can learn on their own”. Therefore, I believe we need to take a change on the way we teach children by starting with the idea of what teaching is. Teaching is much more than direct instruction. As Ken Robinson said teaching is a process of enabling, giving people opportunities, it is a process of encouragement, it is a process of inspiration and mentoring. And because children are not the same, we cannot teach them in the same way, at the same time and expect the same result. Moreover, children understand the world in a very different way than adults (Piaget, cited in Miller, 2012). Therefore, as an adult, as a teacher, it is essential to understand children thinking, creating a bond between teacher and a child so that the learning-teaching process will be easier.

Instead of ‘teaching’, I prefer to call it ‘discussion’. Both teacher and students can have many discussions during school time in order to find out the fact or simply just exchange ideas. There are four aspects of discussion:

• Exploration: it means finding an exploring the truth by asking many questions
• Explanation: it means ability to find out facts, collect information and verify the facts
• Inference: it is the ability to do logical reasoning to study facts of draw inference.
• Prediction: it is the ability to predict the correct answers. New ideas of concepts will be presented.

People often say about changing methods of teaching and find out the way suitable the most to students. In my opinion, I believe that each of methods brings about its own value and by applying them appropriately, we can make the best of learning outcomes. For example, Lecture methods will provide factual knowledge. Discussion method will fetch many new ideas. Experimental methods will prove the validity of knowledge. Activity method will involve pupils in learning situation. Play way methods will develop interest of the students. Story-teaching method will correct lessons into stories.

In conclusion, I believe that most teachers enter the profession with their own values and aims (Thomas, 1995) and it will influence their pedagogical beliefs and their teaching methods as the same way many educators used to do in the history. I hope that teachers will be open-minded, critical thinking of what would be the best for young children. By doing that, children no longer suffering in class, feeling lost in the future and developing their own value, becoming the true happy one that they can be proud of.

References

Miller, P. H. (2002) Theories of Developmental Psychology (4th edition). New York: Worth

Bailey, R. (2006) Learning to Teach in the Primary School. Edited by James Arthur, Teresa Grainger and David Wray. Abingdon: Routledge.

Thomas, D. (1995) Teacher’ Stories, Buckingham: Open University Press.

Eddy Zhong (2015) TEDx Talks. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Yt6raj-S1M  (Accessed: 10/12/2017).

Ken Robinson (2007) TED Talks. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_859505&feature=iv&src_vid=wX78iKhInsc&v=iG9CE55wbtY (Accessed: 10/12/2017).

Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: Macmillan

Peter, R.S. (1966) Ethics and Education. London: Allen and Unwin

Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (2013) Every Child Matters. London: HMSO.