What do you think about Education at this point?

"With all thy learning get understanding."

As a doctoral student in the school of education the number of opinions I have about education has increased dramatically.  Some opinions come experientially from sitting in so many classes (I'm pushing 100 credits in my degree).  One of the most common representations of a class is to describe the teacher.  The teacher is fun, or hard.  Or the workload is high.  Or, the tests are easy.  As learners are we too quick to rely on the quality of instruction as the metric of a class or learning experience?  How would our educational descriptions change if we were instead to talk about education in terms of the goals we set as learners and how well we individually accomplished our goals by overlaying the course objectives with our individual goals?

Recently, I was asked what I think about education, generally.  I have had some more thoughts come to mind since we had the conversation and wanted to write these thoughts down.

One of the best descriptions of the how the purposes of education have changed over time is from Christensen, Horn, and Johnson:

1. Preserve the Democracy and Inclucate Democratic Values
• needed to teach the "basics"--reading, writing, arithmetic
• teaching...social norms and assimilating them into a common American culture
• only an elite group of students continued education beyond grade school
2. Provide Something for Every Student
• 1890s and early 1900s,
• prepare everyone for vocations
• goal was to produce a sound workforce
• needed to extend high school to everyone
• 1954, Brown v. Board of Education - desegregation of schools
• 1957, following Sputnik, an outcry for more rigorous science and math courses
• 1960s, 1970s, schools provided enriching experiences: AP courses, art, music theory, Japanese, more than one band/choir, painting, photography, art appreciation, sports.
• High school graduates: 1900-8%, 1960-69%
• High school Course offerings: 1890-9, 1973-2100
• Four tracks in high school: college, commercial, vocational, and general
• 1973, 60% children enrolled in Kindergarten
3. Keep America Competitive
• US students not performing as well as other countries on certain standardized tests
• Average SAT scores on decline since 1963
• New focus - improve average test scores
• 1981, National Commission on Excellence in Education produced:
• 1983, "A Nation at Risk":
• Report identified several shortcomings in test scores
• Quantifiable outputs mattered more than inputs
• Japan disrupted America's manufacturing
• Comparison of schools was based on students' average test scores
• Interestingly, NAEP scores since 1980s have improved (by 2004)
4. Eliminate Poverty
• No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (pronounced: nickle-"B") places highest priority on average test scores as THE performance metric.
• In addition, not just average test scores for each school, but every child in every demographic must improve their test score.
• Performance measured on % of students who are proficient in core subjects.

I think each of these purposes or aims is a good aim.  I think each one has had both positive and negative impacts on education generally.  

In this context and in the context of the current economic malaise, I have some concerns.  These concerns are not faults of the educational system or those that lead it.  Nor do I suggest to understand fully the source or solutions of these concerns.  But here they are: 

• There is a force pushing education to fill the role of providing marketable skills in a different economic climate than has existed historically.  In the past economic decline has led many to retool or transition to additional skill sets.  The assumption is that additional skill acquisition will result in additional opportunities for contribution.  I'm not sure this assumption will continue in the future as it has in the past.  

And one final thought.  

• As I have considered my education and the purpose of my education amid the daily battles of research, study, reading, writing, rewriting, rereading, and rewriting again.  I take motivation from the possibility that what my education can do for me is open doors to contribute to others in ways I do not fully know now.  By turning my education into a way to contribute instead of a way to acquire I am motivated to continue day to day.  

UPDATE:

I just came across Max Van manen's description and would like to include it here.  It well describes from another perspective what I have written above:

What are we to make of the language of teaching that is thus made available to teachers?  Herein lies the irony of a profound contradiction: the language by way of which teachers are encouraged to interpret themselves and reflect on their living with children is thoroughly imbued by hope, and yet it is almost exclusively a language of doing--it lacks being.  We do not know how to talk of our being with children as a being present with hope for these children.  The language of objectives, aims, teacher expectations, intended learning outcomes, goals, or ends in view is a language of hope out of which hope itself has been systematically purged.  The language of aims and objectives, therefore, is a language of hopeless hope. 

The point is not that the curricular language of educational aims, objectives, or instructional intentions is wrong.  Seen in proper perspective this language is an administrative convenience.  Teachers have always planned what should go on in a particular course, class, or lesson.  The problem is that in an age in which the administrative and technological influences have penetrated into the very blood of our life-world, teachers and even parents seems to have forgotten a certain kind of understanding: what it means to bear children, to hope for children entrusted to their care.  Recalling what thus seems to be forgotten is a kind of recollecting of what belongs to the being of parenting and of what belongs to the being of teaching as in in loco parentis.  

The nihilistic forgetfulness of the essence of our being as teachers curiously turns loose a certain self-destructiveness.  This is evident in the problem lately referred to as teacher burn-out. 

Could this also be related to phd-burn-out?  Parent burn-out?  Van Manen (1990) also writes:

 The only way such teacher burn-out can be overcome is by recapturing in ourselves the knowledge that life is bearable--not in the sense that we can bear it, as we bear a burden which weighs us down, but in the sense that we know that life is there to bear us--as in the living with hope.