Education, purpose of

Been out in the woods again for a long weekend.  A few threads of thought have come together, making me question the purpose of our education system.

Discipline on primary schools has been in the news.  There's some suggestion we should go back to the system of rows of desks facing teacher rather than informal groups of tables with pupils facing each other.

A lot of major economies seem to be in trouble at the moment.  There's a need for the workforce to grow the rate of wealth creation to keep up with the amount governments are spending.  either that or educate the politicians that you can't continually spend more than you have.

Immigrants to this country (UK) seem to have better basic skills and a better work ethic than the native population, so they're grabbing a lot of jobs.  I suppose you have to be well motivated to leave your own country to find work, but the situation does seem a bit extreme.

The final thread was meeting one of the bushcraft instructor's sons.  This guy (early 20s) had been mostly home educated - to say he had retained his creativity would be an understatement.  My immediate response wast to think he wouldn't fit in to a normal workplace and I wanted to crush his rather wild attitudes into conformity- and the word 'crush' I think is the right one to describe my attitude.

Bring these threads together and it became apparent to me that I think the education system should be geared to producing productive clones.  The individual's value is to bolster GDP and that is what education must be about.  That's fair enough as the cost of ones education comes from the value created by the businesses and big corporations.  But is it right?  Are we justified in teaching conformity and repressing individual creativity.

I've had a little experience of teaching.  It's clearly impossible to provide enough resources to teach each pupil genuinely as an individual.  Even if it was possible, there is a view from the community and the individual teacher as to what is right and/or acceptable, and this will be imposed on any learner.  There are also limits placed on creativity in that the 'true' view of the world needs to be taught.  Accepted texts and the knowledge required to pass exams is not open to creative questioning, they need to be learnt by rote.  (That last sentence seems wrong)  Moral 'truths' are also not open to question.   It used to be the church providing unquestionable moral leadership, now it's the multicultural dictats of the secular government which may not be questioned.

My experience of school teachers, as a class, suggests they don't like what they are teaching questioned.  There are certainly practical reasons why a teacher can't function if the accepted truth can be questioned by the learners, but it seems to me to go beyond that and the teachers ego becomes involved in their belief that they're always right.  The bushcraft instructors I'm involved with have opened my eyes to this - they're all very open to any ideas from their learners and will question their own knowledge if a good objection is raised to a practise or item of information.

There is then a need for basic life skills and work attitudes to be 'rammed down the throat' of learners for the nation to function and create the wealth that is needed (and desired) by the population.  Traditional methods probable work best here with disciplined rote learning.  Beyond these basics there seems to me little need to force feed information to learners without question.  There seems an idea that teaching methods need to be uniform throughout the system, I suppose I'm suggesting that teaching of the basics needs to be rigorous, but that 'extras' should enjoy a lighter method of teaching, with originality of thought, creativity and questioning of accepted norms all encouraged.  Some real life investigation and research should be good too.

While we're on the subject, I was teaching 16-18 year olds, many of whom had zero motivation to learn but wanted the bits of paper (exam passes) at the end of their course. If I've said it before, I'll say it again, it would be far better for the demotivated students to leave school as early as possible (14?, 12?) and go out to work to support themselves (no benefit payments at this age!).  Make it easy for them to return to school until their mid twenties - most, I think, will return to learning with a better understanding of why they need an education and they'll be properly motivated.  Woe betide any rotten teachers then!  The courses I liked teaching best were those for adults who were there to get the skills they wanted to get a good job - they drove you to teach them...