Under Construction: The Objective of Education

Dear Alice,

 I really enjoyed your format for learning!

I wish you and Paul much success in your endeavor to decipher what education is out to do for the child. Wil and I were trying to figure out how freedom and liberation, or for that matter, how integration and freedom are opposites. If you use integration in the way that students were integrated into another school system, maybe they achieved freedom from the reigns of oppression that stifled them in the schools they were in before. In this way, freedom and integration actually compliment rather than oppose each other. So what I am suggesting is, watch your word use, or explain your word use better so that lay persons understand what you mean to say!

A major part of my education, for as long as I can recall, tended to be based on the notion that there many possibilities in life if you get a "good education", and that that good education prepares you for a better life.  Most boundaries and guidelines surrounding what was acceptable and what was not were very limiting.  The idea of an open-ended approach to teaching, allowing diversity in its natural state to exist was practically unheard of.  Integration and freedom are a part of life.  Survival and liberation are also a part of life.  Education could be thought of as not just learning things in life, but as life itself.    

This afternoon's reading of excerpts from Paul and Alice's paper and the discussion that ensued stimulated me to think that education is not so much about teaching, learning, and grades as it is about an approach to learning that each person must develop for herself or himself.  As a teacher, I can be a role model and provide the tools, materials, and opportunities for my students to explore and revise the stories of their unconscious brains. As a teacher of a specific content, biology, I will provide the framework for the exploration in my course as I suspect the teachers of other content must. My job will also be to initiate the connections among the different frameworks whenever there is an opportunity to do so. I will also give thought to the widely used hero approach to education- talking only about those people who have achieved recognition in the content. While these role models are important, I will continue to ask students in the high school to share their experiences in science with the middle school students.

This segment was rich for me in that I realize, yet again, just how lax society is (and is willing to become), even in Education.  As we read the handout Mrs. Resnick shared with us, I noticed the first reader did not start at the beginning and no one redirected them to do so.  I believe there is learning in the details.  When we don't teach our students to respect the details by paying attention to them, I believe their success is not as successful as it has the potential to be.  For example, this could easily be the difference between earning a 3.8 and a 4.0, and in terms of quality points, cause one to miss the Deans' List by one point...how sad.  Where, had they paid attention to the details this might not have been the case.  Now is making the Deans' List the most important aspect of a person's university experience...probably not; at least not for this conversation.  However, it is not a negative experience/aspiration.  I believe it is more important to start at the start and move forward...being as prepared as possible...gives a person more of an advantage than the person who just starts somewhere and goes anywhere.  In saying that, I believe there are those journeys with merit in just getting going and seeing where you go.  I agree that doing something is better than doing nothing; realizing that nothing is something.

My grandmother taught me how to set a table, my mother taught me which to use for what, and both of them taught me table manners...not putting my elbows on the table, not singing/dancing/ or whistling at the table, eat with on hand keeping the other in my lap across my napkin, not being late to the table, and washing my hands before coming to the table (even to the point of using finger bowls after eating finger food while at the table).  Once taught these social skills, I sat at the table with everyone else and used this knowledge set, as I watched and demonstrated what was modeled before me.  Had I not be taught these globally accepted rules, I would have been totally unprepared, and less accepted, in family and foreign settings.  My point is that there is more to life than just letting everyone go for themselves and wherever they end up is fine, because it's their experience or story.  Many things in life must be taught, as well as modeled.  There is an essential component of learning that is imparted in the conversation of teaching that simply modeling will not and can not relay.  These are all aspects that have made us socially adept and without them we would be socially inept and unacceptable in personal and profession settings.

As a career educator I have sat through many superintendents and their 'vision'.  Every time there is a regime change, the baby often gets thrown out with the bath water.  That is to say that programs that are working get scraped and we start something new, yet again.  This provides instability for the teacher and the students, the parents and the community as well.  One the of entities that benefits the most is the book publishers.  They bank on decision maker turn over, because they know this profits them.  Often it is proven that the decision makers are getting kickbacks for this.  How sad.  I am all for making a profit; although I am not interested in these types of kickbacks.  These benefits comes at the detriment of effective programs where teaching and learning is taking place.  School districts spend fortunes on professional development and training, only to have to 're-tool' and spend again with the next new idea and/or changing of the guard.   ...and we wonder why itinerant and after school programs are always getting cut, thus leaving students at a disadvantage for extra-curricular learning, activities, and exploring.

A really good connection for utilization between the “Explorer” (in the model that Judith and I drew) and the other parts is conversation as Paul suggested.
Best learning can occur when the Explorer is first having an internal conversation (reflection) about the meaning s(he) has discovered. Also important is the safety felt in discussing those meanings with her guides (parents, teachers) without judgment. Equally necessary is peer (conversational) interactions about these ideas within a safe environment often constructed by the guides.

The title of this paper struck me, The purpose of education:preperation or...living; education to my mind is neither.  What it is to me is the gaining of knowledge in order to create a more fulfilled and informed life.  Also, it's purpose is to acquire all the knowledge one can so that one can live a purposeful and educated life.

The teacher needs to be prepared in order to prepare the students.

The teacher needs to give to the student a feeling that he or she has the power to learn in order to shape their future.

In my opinion education is influenced by three different factors: school,  family and community. All of these contribute to the environment in which the child learns.

The difference between parental involvement in schools is vast.  Sometimes parents are overly involved, and other times they are not involved nearly enough.  When they are too involved they take independence away from the student.  I think communication with the family is very important because it makes the student feel like his or her family and teacher are working together to help them succeed in school and in life.

After Alice's presentation, I feel further supported in the idea that, maybe at times, educational planning and the educational expectations that exist need to be completely thrown out the window in order to "truly" inspire creativity and a passion for that creativity.  In my mind, creativity is sparked not through rigid planning, oppressive objectives, and a set of bureaucratic standards, but through spontaneous insight coupled with the comfort to express those ideas. Upon reflection of some of our greatest contributors to social and artistic change (Ozzie Osbourne, Picasso, Mozart).  These individuals are not recognized and revered for their ability to conform, adhere, and promote the status quo.  Yet, they are identifiable for their willingness to be spontaneous and flexible, and to act on those impulses, even if it is in conflict with what is expected from the establishment.  It seems to me that in order to recognize establishment, you need those and that which is counter to the establishment.  When this conflict appears, we see the greatest in human achievement.  One can believe that there exists the possibility that none of these individuals "planned" to have the cultural influences they had, but merely acted upon intuition, creativity, and passion to see these ideas come to life. 

This then motivates me to reflect on education and its role on planning for learners.  Is the purpose of education to help learners plan for a finite goal or achievement in life, or is it to provide them with the tools to better sort their way through the experiences of life in order to build their own understanding of what is happening around them?  In some sense, formal education can be an inhibitor of learner achievement.  We often start out telling students in the elementary years..."You can do and be anything you want.  You just have to work hard and put your mind to it."  However, that sentiment changes greatly when students reach the secondary and higher learning environments.  There the notion shifts to "what college are you going to go to" to "what are you going to major in" and so on and so on.  This becomes a much more rigid plan than one could have ever imagined based on the elementary perception that is passed along. So in this sense, we like to believe that the triangle of education is pointed at the bottom and opens up to a variety of opportunities as we progress through formal education.  However, this is in contrast to the explicit specialized nature of secondary and higher education.   Before you graduate, you must have a degree in a specialized field and certification before you are even able to consider being accepted by that field. Even the names of some of our institutions reflect this.

The role of informal education is critical.  The title "teacher" is now merely a word to identify a particular occupation for which you receive compensation for your services. But in a more global sense, parents, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers and so on offer a variety of learning experiences that no school or formal institution could ever emulate.  Therefore, it is in my opinion that equal attention to informal education, one without rigid standards, one that allows for the growth of the inquisitive self, one that encourages risks and the comfort to take them, and one that does deviate from a plan (if it has one at all), is well over due. 

After discussing with a partner a piece of Alice's and Paul's paper that we found the most interesting, Kate and I decided to pick the 5th paragraph.

"Our notion of education as "life itself" draws on biological evolution as both a foundation and a metaphor, and integrates it with considerations of brain function and cultural organization. Our hope is that others may find that the "education as life itself" perspective opens the door to reconsiderations of the idea of preparation in pegagogical practice at all levels of the educational enterprise".

I think this excerpt draws a lot from what we have been talking about in the institute in previous days with regards to the aspect that not all individuals learn best in a classroom setting. Better yet, many people learn new things not even with the motivation of setting out to learn a particular thing but rather simply through living their life. I know that personally many of the things I have learned since stepping foot on the campus of Bryn Mawr three years ago have not even been directly through the classroom. Through listening to my peers, living amongst them other students from all around the world, and by conversing with peers and professors alike, I have learned a wealth of knowledge that could have never been pre-meditated. 

I think this excerpt is seriously interesting even more so since beginning my work as an intern at this institute which has allowed me to think in ways that I may not have before!