I am beginning to appreciate this blogging thing more with each post I write. What I like best is that these are my ideas and have no effect on anyone except those who choose to accept them. Readers even get to pick and choose which of my ideas they want. I will never know what effect they will have, but I do get to read the comments, and for the most part they are positive. I appreciate the comments that are even more thoughtful than my original post. That being said, I can now post something that some will find upsetting . If you are in that group by the end of the post, come back to this first paragraph and remind yourself of this opening statement. It may have more meaning for you the second time.
Through my entire career in education I have seen plans that were supposed to revolutionize the educational system, the latest attempt being “No Child Left Behind”. Now with this new administration we are looking at merit pay for teachers. A plan flawed in its conception with a great potential to fail and once again target teachers as the reason for failure. I am putting an IMHO here to quell the stirring beasts who are about to pounce on the reply box.
As a teacher of teachers I always instruct my students to have an objective or a goal for every lesson they teach. Their purpose is to focus their thoughts, direction, and energy to accomplish that goal. Most importantly however, they are to assess their students along the way to make adjustments in order to complete the goal.
If we apply that same principle to our educational system, I would expect a positive result. All we have to do is ask the question, “What is the goal of education?” You have to see where this is going by now. The problem is who will answer that question: Politician, Parent, Administrator, Teacher, Student, Tax-payer, or that non-educator sitting on the educational advisory panel? The answers will muddy what should be a clear answer.
Here comes the IMHO again. As far as I can tell, the goal of education is to provide workers for the job force. That seems to be the driving force in everyone’s perception of education in America and probably elsewhere. Before you scroll to the reply box, finish the post. I might say something else to set you off. Employment seems to me, to be the Goal of education. Some might say the goal is to get the student to college. Moving a student to Higher Ed, it is just a hand-off to the college to prepare a student for higher paying employment. Colleges are ruled by the same goal.
The problem with all of this is that when the goal of employment is reached the perception of many is that the need for education, and learning has ended. That is true for many individuals no matter what line of work or whatever profession they enter. That most definitely includes ALL of the professionals in education. Once they get their job there is no longer a need to learn. We have even coined a phrase for those who are exceptions. We call them Life-Long Learners. Those are the people who did not buy into the education- culminates-with-employment idea.
If the goal for Education is employment and a student becomes employed, the goal has been attained. There is no need for continued learning. We have succeeded. If however, that is not the outcome we want, maybe we should go back to the beginning. Let us look at the Goal for which we must focus our thoughts, direction, and energy to accomplish. Maybe it needs tweaking, or clarification, or assessing, or a complete change. As an educator I have to throw all that in, even though IMHO the goal sucks and should be scraped.
It may be time to establish a Goal we can all agree upon. Here is my contribution or the point I would like to make with this discussion. My Goal would be to promote Learning and Literacy through education. “We do that”, you say. If we did, why do so many people stop learning and being literate once they get a job?
At one time people needed to spend time reading books and engaging in conversation and debate and collaboration. It was difficult to do when there was no time or place to do this after one graduated. After all, the goal was attained and there was no need. The Internet has changed all that.
If Administrators made their decisions on whether or not something promotes and supports literacy and learning, many decisions for financing, curriculum, and staffing might be different. If principals had that as a goal, School policies, support of teachers, professional development and even interaction with parents might be more purposeful. Teachers, many who will claim this to be their goal, will be more open to accepting new ideas and new tools for preparing kids to learn beyond the classroom. A skill they will need if we meet the goal of learning and literacy.
Employment and supplying a workforce should not be the goal of educators. That is the stuff of politics. Let the need to continually learn and communicate in a literate manner be the Goal of All educators. All decisions should be weighed with this in mind. All assessments should address this goal. We would need no standardized tests with this as a standardized Goal. IMHO.
Now you can return to my first paragraph and then scroll to the Reply box and leave your comment. I hope my humble opinion has given you pause to reflect.
My Island View 
Great post! I completely agree with you about the current purpose of education. I wrote about this some months ago on my blog. I would be honored if you would read it. http://educationstormfront.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/stormfront-part-1-what-is-past-is-prologue/ (there is a part 2 as well)
I think one of the best lines in your post is where you say the answer to “What is to goal of education?” and you say it depends on who is answering the question. Completely correct. In a perfect world, the answer would come from the students and teachers. In our world more and more it is coming from Washington DC. How messed up is that? Some bureaucrat in DC knows how to educate my children? Really? That’s a stupid as thinking they know better than my Doctor what I need for medical care… but I digress. I think the whole educational system would be better off if we just disbanded the Dep of Ed and returned control to the states. Just my humble opinion!
The goal of education- learning and literacy? Who could disagree with that and yet I am sure there will be many who will. Think this is so simple and yet so profound! Hope that many people will adopt this as the objective of schooling.
Tom,
I think that society as a whole has reached an agreement as to the goal of education. It is to succeed on standardized assessments. Now the question is, what kinds of content is evaluated on these assessments? If society had not reached this decision the assessments would not have anywhere near the power that they currently do have.
Andrew Pass
http://www.lessontech.blogspot.com
If the goal of education is to get a job, then why is teaching a profession for which we continually need to get credits, clock-hours, just to be able to keep the job we already have? To me, education is a process. It should not be comprised mainly of high stakes testing, but of opportunities in which we allow students to explore, create, and fail with enlightenment. I love teaching, but I see so little of it in classrooms. I see teachers being reduced to information givers so that their data shows they have been productive, but what I want to see is the wide eyes of the aha moment in a child allowed to experience something more profound than filling in the circle on a bubble sheet.
Great ideas! I love your Goal for education – it is simple and powerful. My only contention (you knew it had to come!) is that we all stop learning when we enter the workforce. I don’t think some people stop learning but instead, begin learning in a different way. It does not look like the “traditional” model but it is education. We find what we enjoy (hopefully) and continue to improve and get better by DOING. Many would argue that we should begin doing this much earlier in education but that may be difficult given that we all don’t know what we want to do with our lives early on. We get there, try it on for size while learning much in the process, and decide. I think if you truly enjoy what you are doing you will naturally want to improve and get better. Thanks for the post and stirring up the pot. These conversations are great.
Noreen I think Tom was saying the purpose of Education was for the students to get job, not for teachers to have jobs… I could be wrong, but that is how I read that.
Tom K IMHO the reason people stop learning is that the goal of education is what you get at the end, not what you learn in the middle. Imagine what would happen to Education if we got rid of University Degrees… You take what classes you want, for as long as you wanted to acquire a skill set you think is needed for your chosen career. (your first career, heh). Then you keep learning through your life.
Your comments aren’t really that inflamatory to me. I’m right there beside you. Education should not be about job training, but life training, and promoting a spirit of learning on every step of our journey. I think that even the close-walled school has become just one of the options for learners now at every level of education, and that is fantastic, as it acknowledges that learners LEARN in a variety of ways using a multiplicity of approaches. Now, I’m sure bureaucrats and politicians haven’t realized this yet, but the day that we vote from our PCs and Macbooks will be the day they realize that the change has come to them.
I recently read a book by an American called Dennis Littky – ‘The Big Picture – Education Is Everyone’s Business’. In this book he talks about what he would like all the children in his school being able to do when they leave – he calls these his ‘real goals of education’. I like these and wonder what your ‘real goals of education’ would be? Anyway he said he would like all children to …
Be life-long learners
Be passionate
Be ready to take risks
Be able to problem solve & think critically
Be able to look at things differently
Be able to work independently & with others
Be creative
Care & want to give back to the community
Persevere
Have integrity & self-respect
Have moral courage
Be able to use the world around them well
Speak well, write well & work with numbers
Truly enjoy their life & their work
Again quoting from Dennis Littky’s book he talks of an American Educationalist saying, in 1993, “I know how idealistic it may sound but it is my urgent hope that in the century ahead students will be judged not by their performance on a single test, but by the quality of their lives. It is my hope that students in the classroom of tomorrow will be encouraged to be creative not conforming, and learn to cooperate rather than compete.”
For years I have been frustrated by teachers who told me their goal was to get students ready for university because of some mistaken idea that university = higher paying jobs. (Plumbers make more than teachers and they have no student loans.) This misguided idea has resulted in a severe shortage of trades people where I live. At the same time, I see plenty of recent Arts grads working for minimum wage and being overwhelmed by their student loans.
Tom,
Great post. I agree with you that something needs to change. As a lifelong student (so far, at least!) I indeed do long for the day where I will no longer have to attend classes, be graded on everything I write, etc., but not for the day of learning to end. Even if the goal of education right now is to ready students for the workforce, they’ll never become fully successful or reach their full potential in their job if learning ends with employment.
I’ve found that, although I’ve been in college for 5 years now, some of my best teachers are still from high school. And those were the ones that were inspiring, the ones who persuaded me, without knowing it, to write on my own time, to read on my own time, and to think on my own time, without it being an ‘assignment.’ Those are the ones I still keep in touch with, years later.
I really like what Mike said about what all children should be able to do. That being said, I think that some teachers, like the few I had in high school, do inspire their students to be the type of people Mike talks about. It may not be the end-goal of all education professionals right now, but it is for some. And even though that number might be small, some is better than none, and it’s my hope that that number continues to grow.
Tom, I think many educators share your opinion. Well, at least I do. Here in NYC I feel the system has failed our students miserably. Kids STILL think they can get by w/ an 8th grade education! And we throw around the phrase “life long learning” but my students think we as teachers don’t practice what we preach. O think we need to model how we as adults are life-long learners.
But right now I can’t read the earlier comments because I’m on my iPhone in my car in my school parking lot. I will come back later tonite to read your comments.
Hey T
Hey Tom – it’s interesting that in the old days (remember them?) education had a variety of goals – some kids were on an academic track, with college in their future. Some a vocational track, and some on a ‘business’ track (e.g., secretarial skills). Two of the three tracks were job-oriented, the 3rd (academic) lead to many options – professions (medicine, law, education, etc), social sciences (philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc). I believe education should have many options. We all learn differently, and we all learn different things and have different goals. The time from age 4 or 5 to 21 or so is the time to try them out and see if they fit. I think if there was one goal of education (be it get a job, or ‘literacy and learning’) we would be closing some doors to kids.
I think your conception is to simplistic. I think the minimum objective is to obtain employment but that is hardly the goal and there are many, many people that go far beyond that goal so I think it’s not fair to say that we have somehow set our sights too low.
HOWEVER, while many exceed the minimum, many, many fail to reach the minimum and THAT is why there is such an emphasis on this goal. Like Maslow, this minimum must be achieved and must be a focus of policy and spending before we can afford to get fancier.
So all the handwringing over testing and business degrees, etc. is misplaced. When the minimum is achieved, by policy, then the higher goals can receive greater focus.
Unfortunately, aiming for the minimum often gets you just that. With little control on variation, quite a few don’t meet minimum.
Our problem is even more fundamental than this. When you talk about the goal of education, do you mean “education,” or do you mean “schooling.” As long as we confuse one with the other, we can’t talk about the goals of either. As a homeschooling parent, and director of a multi-generational teaching orchestra, it is my experience that schooling is more often a distraction from real education than a benefit.
On the other hand, as an experienced teacher without the schooling necessary for licensure, it sure looks like the entire educational system is designed to qualify people for work, with teachers the least likely to find alternate routes to qualification. As long as the schools are based entirely on a schooling=employment model for their own employees, how can we expect them to teach anything different to their students?
As part of that system for schooling teachers, how do you deal with this problem?
Excellent post @tomwhitby!
I am currently enrolled in a class focusing on adult learning for my Ed.D and we have been discussing this exact point. I am of the same mind as yourself, and of many of those who have left comments, that we really need to review the goals we have for our education system.
Over time, society’s expectations for the education system have changed, and each time I believe the system has responded and met those expectations. When we are told by politicians that our system is failing, I believe it may be because the expectations have changed again yet our system is still structured for the old expectations.
Can you imagine the incredible success that would result if every stakeholder held the same vision of education and we turned out incredibly dedicated teachers loose to achieve that vision?
The final thought I have tonight has to do with establishing higher education as a goal for our students so they may get higher paying jobs. If 95% of our high school students were to graduate from college, would there be enough high paying jobs for them all to to secure one? I’m not entirely sure that is realistic, and I think that we might want to keep that in mind when reviewing our vision of education.
Thanks for the great reading tonight, yours was a great post!
Cheers!
Great! Concise and well addressed.
May I suggest (with due humility) that even the goals of learning and literacy are not lofty enough. I would put forward that learning and literacy both leave a student with an internal focus. Maybe it is understood that a literate and learned student would impact the world around him.
Why not learning and problem solving or creativity, with literacy as the understood goal? This changes the focus from internal to external. Ideally this would bring about future leaders of thought and invention.
The purpose of education? This is the same as the purpose of life … to be, to exist, to grow, to nurture, to empower, to shift, to change, to challenge … to serve my fellow man, to better society … in short, to make a positive difference!
Thanks, Tom for making us think and reflect about what we do and why we choose to do this thing we call education.
What a great post. The purpose of education is something that all educators should think about. I feel that the purpose of education is to inspire. Students need to get that spark from somewhere. Sometimes, a teacher is match for that fire. Keep the great posts coming. @thenerdyteacher
This is exactly what I have been thinking for some time now. I think in business, you serve three masters: the shareholders, your customers, your company (i.e. coworkers, supervisors, etc.). In education, you are forced to serve many masters, all of whom are screaming to have their agenda heard.
You have the students, who need the tools to succeed in life, but also need to be mentored and guided to ‘learn how to learn’. Sadly, I think this ‘master’ has the quietest ‘voice’.
You have the PARENTS of the students, who are looking for you to get Johnny into Harvard, teach him to balance his checkbook, and ensure his financial, emotional and physical success in this world.
You have the taxpayers, who are looking for you to do as much as you can with these kids but don’t want to pay for it.
You have administration, who wants you make sure these kids all pass these standardized tests and make the school look good (not bashing admin here, just pointing out they are under pressure to make sure the school looks ‘successful’).
You have society, who wants to know why Johnny can’t compete in the global marketplace, after all, what the heck was he doing in the public school system for the past 13 years?
Having worked in the high tech industry for many years (primarily in sales/marketing) I think one of the greatest challenges to the education system in this country is that there are too many agendas, too many ‘cooks in the kitchen’ and simply too many ‘customers’ to please.
Our responsibility is to our students. Not to ensure that they will get into a good college or even get a great job someday. But to give them the skills they need to think, create, analyze, compare, debate, understand and express. All the things we teach them (math, social studies, language arts, science) reinforce those skills. They need to be able to take those skills and apply them in the future and use them in life to be successful no matter what they decide to do for a living.
I think my idea is still a little too abstract to explain, but I hope it makes some sense. I have no hope that education will change too much too quickly because we cannot achieve our goals as educators when each ‘master’ wants something different.
Thanks for the post, this one is one of my favorites so far!
I basically agree with many of the comments in this thread about the purpose of education being ‘loftier’ than just getting a job, but it is important to recognize that educational level does have an impact on one’s economic situation. I saw the following graphic that was distributed at a Washington DC meeting of school board members nationwide. It shows that as educational level rises, unemployment rate falls. Now, one could certainly say that aiming for the loftier goals would necessarily subsume the practical one of getting a better job, but it is important to keep in mind that the practical one is on the minds of many of our ‘clients’ – students and their families. See http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=10645497&id=739630537 for the graphic.