Purpose of Education

Purpose of Education
Background: Ken Robinson explains the history of our current education system and how it is still designed to meet the needs of people during the industrial revolution, rather than the needs of modern society. He believes that we need to change the fundamental model of education. Both Richard Kahlenberg and Jennifer Medbery give their opinions as well about what education should do for students but doesn’t, either because of the system itself or because of the way students are taught. This is not to say that everything in the education system is broken or wrong, but improvements could definitely be made.

Directions: Cleary state what you believe the purpose of education is and how those purposes might be achieved. Use at least two of the sources assigned in class. What is the purpose of education and how can we achieve it? You can use details from your life as well, but you must use details from the texts as well.

Essay Requirements:
?Describe the purpose of education and ways to achieve these purposes.
?Analyze the effect(s) of education on people’s lives, both positive and negative.
?Explain these effects and possible improvements that could be made.
?Incorporate information from at least two outside sources by summarizing and paraphrasing. NO DIRECT QUOTATIONS.
?Demonstrate paragraph focus/development & effective organization in the essay.

The Purposes of Higher EducationBy Richard D. Kahlenberg
This past Tuesday morning, I gave the convocation address for new students at Flagler, a private four-year liberal-arts college in St. Augustine, Florida. Founded in 1968, Flagler College is a relatively new institution built around the grounds of a stunning 19th century hotel and set in America’s oldest city. Perhaps because Flagler charges in tuition and fees about half of what the average private colleges does, it has attracted a fair degree of socioeconomic diversity.
I was asked in my remarks to reflect on the larger goals of higher education. Although speech givers are often advised to stick to three points, because studies find audiences don’t remember more than that, I outlined five purposes. In addition to the standard rationales for taxpayer support of education—producing well-trained employees in a free-market economy and intelligent citizens in a self-governing democracy—I outlined several additional goals, and in each case evaluated how well higher education is doing.
1. To ensure that every student, no matter the wealth of her parents, has a chance to enjoy the American Dream.
It used to be that there were two major paths to economic security in the United States: Go to college or join a unionized occupation. But today, less than 7% of private sector workers are unionized, compared with 35% in the 1950s. So now, the most reliable avenue to economic security involves getting a four-year degree.
Overall, however, American higher education is not doing a very good job of promoting social mobility. According to recent data, 82% of those from higher-income families get a bachelor’s degree by age 24, compared with just 8% from low-income families. A society in which children from wealthy families are about 10 times as likely to get college degrees as those from poor families is one marked by profound inequality.
2. To educate leaders in our democracy.
Thomas Jefferson famously wanted the United States to be led by a “natural aristocracy” of “virtue and talent” rather than an “artificial aristocracy” based on wealth and birth. And a system of free public education, coupled with accessible higher education, was critical, in his view, to producing America’s leaders.
Yet, once again, in practice, many institutions of higher education fail to live up to this ideal today by admitting some students through so-called “legacy preferences.” As Michael Lind noted in a book I edited entitled Affirmative Action for the Rich, “By reserving places on campus for members of the pseudo-aristocracy of wealth and birth, legacy preferences introduce an aristocratic snake into the democratic republican Garden of Eden.”
3. To advance learning and knowledge through faculty research and by giving students the opportunity to broaden their minds even when learning does not seem immediately relevant to their careers.
As Louis Menand has written in The New Yorker magazine, college is a time for you to learn “things about the world and yourself that, if you do not learn them in college, you are unlikely to learn anywhere else.” Later in life, they will be caught up in family and career, so at least some portion of their time in college should be spent becoming “a reflective and culturally literate human being.”
Yet, here again, higher education falls short. Many colleges see themselves as vocational schools, and the study Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, famously found than an astounding 45 percent of students learn little in the first two years of college, as measured by progress on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA).
4. To teach students to interact with people different than themselves.
Our public schools are more segregated today than at any time in the last three decades. Even as our society is becoming more diverse, our student populations are being pulled apart into separate camps, divided by race and class. American colleges—because they draw upon students from a variety of neighborhoods and states, and countries—provide a unique environment in which students of different backgrounds can learn from one another.
Many colleges have done a fairly good job of promoting racial diversity through affirmative action programs, but most do a poor job of bringing students from different economic backgrounds together. As Walter Benn Michaels has noted, many colleges now have “rich kids of all colors.”
5. To help students find a passion—and even a purpose in life.
When I was a senior in college, I wrote my thesis about Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign for president, in which he built a powerful coalition of working-class white voters and black and Hispanic voters—who were, at the time, at war with one another—by making appeals to common economic interests. Kennedy thought that the economic divide in this country was even greater than the racial and ethnic divides, and that hypothesis—bolstered by lots of evidence—is something I’ve pursued in almost all my research and writing since college.
It’s hard to know how well higher education is doing in helping students find a passion, helping them think through what they’re really good at, what they’re truly interested in, and what they believe are the most critical problems facing the country. But as students start a new academic year at Flagler—and at colleges across the country—I hope that officials in higher education think deeply about how best to spark in students a passionate interest that will help them lead truly meaningful lives.
Reinventing Education to Teach Creativity And Entrepreneurship
By Jennifer Medbery
We don’t need to memorize things any more, but we still need teachers to guide our students toward learning the best ways to problem solve. The question is: How do you measure that?
As you read this, students all over the country are sitting for state standardized exams. Schools spend up to 40% of the year on test prep, so that, shall we say, no child is left behind. Schools’ futures and funding depend on the number of students who fall into performance bands like “Advanced,” “Proficient,” and “Approaching Basic” based on bubble sheets and number two pencils.
But this is not the rant you think it is.
Let’s get one thing straight from the beginning: As a former high school teacher, I’m not opposed to standardized testing. Common assessments are a critical way of maintaining high expectations for all kids. Great teachers want benchmarks to measure progress and ensure that they are closing the gap between students in their classroom and the kids across town. What you measure should matter. The problem is, most American classrooms are measuring the wrong thing.
Schools used to be gatekeepers of knowledge, and memorization was key to success. Thus, we measured students’ abilities to regurgitate facts and formulas. Not anymore. As Seth Godin writes, “If there’s information that can be recorded, widespread digital access now means that just about anyone can look it up. We don’t need a human being standing next to us to lecture us on how to find the square root of a number.”
Given this argument, many entrepreneurs see a disruptive opportunity to “democratize” education, meaning that everyone now has a platform from which to teach, and anyone can learn anything anywhere anytime. Ventures like Udacity, ShowMe, LearnZillion, and Skillshare increase the efficiency of the learning market by lowering barriers to knowledge acquisition.
Yet there is an inherent bias in the promise of these new platforms that favors extraordinarily self-directed learners.
But by itself, this “any thing/place/time” learning won’t lead to the revolution we seek. We also have the responsibility of unlocking the potential of every student because the world needs more leaders, problem-finders, and rule-breakers. Teachers are perfectly positioned to take on this challenge.
The primary purpose of teaching can now shift away from “stand and deliver” and becomes this: to be relentless about making sure every student graduates ready to tinker, create, and take initiative.
Sarah Beth Greenberg, a visionary elementary school principal in New Orleans, describes this as the balance between the art and science within teaching. The art is in the relationships you build with kids, and the science is purposeful assessment that generates real evidence of student growth.
Which brings me back to my original point. Accountability is a good thing, but only when you are measuring what matters.
Dan Meyer is right when he describes today’s curriculum as “paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them.” Imagine a world where the math textbook was replaced with open-ended, thought-provoking opportunities to question the world around us. In these classrooms, students would learn how to think, how to find problems, not just plug in numbers to solve them. What if quizzes measured kids’ ability to question, not answer?
Our schools should be producing kids who tinker, make, experiment, collaborate, question, and embrace failure as an opportunity to learn. Our schools must be staffed with passionate teachers who are not just prepared to foster creativity, perseverance, and empathy, but are responsible for ensuring kids develop these skills.
Most importantly, in these schools, old-fashioned gradebooks and multiple-choice tests aren’t good enough. Teachers need better tools to track several dimensions of student progress. Kids are more than just test scores. The narrative is important, and teaching demands a new type of CRM (classroom relationship management) to capture anecdotal notes and evidence of student growth. Teachers must become disciplined and analytical about identifying students’ strengths and skill gaps, continuously turning classroom data into a plan of action.
Schools like this exist in the dozens, but we need them in the hundreds of thousands:
• Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia uses a project-based learning model, where the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection are emphasized in all classes.
• Big Picture Learning schools across the country are built on the foundational principle that there is no canon of information that all students must know, an idea that flies in the face of the current Common Core standards movement.
• High schoolers who want to design software that changes lives can do so at the Academy for Software Engineering in New York City when it opens this August.
• And the school to which I’ll send my own kids hasn’t opened yet either. Bricolage Academyis a proposed new public elementary school in New Orleans. While the name conjures up images of the streets in the historic French Quarter, the name is borrowed from the French verb, bricoler, to tinker. Incubated in 4.0 Schools’ innovation lab, Bricolage’s founding principal recognizes that technology and increasing diversity will continue to influence our society in unpredictable ways and thus, a school must continually adapt so that students are prepared for the world they will enter as adults.
But we’re shortchanging kids if we aren’t relentless about measuring outcomes in these new models. Teachers are the linchpins here. They’re much more than just motivational coaches, they must become results-oriented diagnosticians of student learning.
In a world where the sheer volume and accessibility of information is growing exponentially, perhaps what’s most remarkable is that to create, tinker, and take initiative in this new world doesn’t always require high-tech gadgets. Take nine-year-old Caine Monroy and his cardboard arcade for example. Monroy has shown the world that all you need is a little ingenuity and a cardboard box.
Imagine a world in which all teachers were relentless about fostering that same creativity in all of their students.

?Write clearly & fluently, with few grammar errors and appropriate word choice
TITLE: Speakers Speakers : Date: Venue:

RSAnimate Changing Education Paradigms Sir Ken Robinson 16 June 2008 RSA, 8 John Adam Street, London WC2N 6EZ

NB This is an unedited transcript of the event. Whilst every effort is made to ensure accuracy there may be phonetic or other errors depending on inevitable variations in recording quality. Please do contact us to point out any errors, which we will endeavour to correct. To reproduce any part of this transcript in any form please contact RSA Lectures Office at lectures@rsa.org.uk or +44(0)20 7451 6868 The views expressed are not necessarily those of the RSA or its Trustees. www.theRSA.org

RSA Animate | Changing Education Paradigms

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Ken Robinson: Robinson: Every country on earth at the moment is reforming public education. There are two reasons for this. The first of them is economic. People are trying to work out how do we educate our children to take their place in the economies of the 21st century? How do we do that given that we can’t anticipate what the economy will look like at the end of next week, as the recent turmoil is demonstrated. How do we do that? The second is cultural. Every country on earth is trying to figure out how do we educate our children so they have a sense of cultural identity so that we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities while being part of the process of globalisation? How do we square that circle? The problem is they’re trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past. And on the way they’re alienating millions of kids who don’t see any purpose in going to school. When we went to school we were kept there with a story which is if you work hard and did well and got a college degree you would have a job. Our kids don’t believe that. And they’re right not to, by the way. You’re better having a degree than not but it’s not a guarantee anymore. And particularly not if the route to it marginalises most of the things that you think are important about yourself. So people say we have to raise standards if this is a breakthrough, you know, really, yes we should; why would you lower them? I haven’t come across an argument that persuades me of lowering them. But raising them of course we should raise them. The problem is that the current system of education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual, culture of the enlightenment. And in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution. Before the middle of the 19th century there were no systems of public education, not really. I mean you could get educated by Jesuits if you had the money. But public education paid for from taxation, compulsory to everybody and free at the point of delivery – that was a revolutionary idea. And many people objected to it – they said it’s not possible for many street kids and working class children to benefit from public education, they’re incapable of learning to read and write and why are we spending time on this? So there’s also built into it a whole series of assumptions about social structure and capacity.

It was driven by an economic imperative of the time but running right through it was an intellectual model of the mind, which was essentially the enlightenment view of intelligence; that real intelligence consists in this capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning and a knowledge of the classics originally, what we come to think of as academic ability. And this is deep in the gene pool of public education; there are only two types of people – academic and non-academic; smart people and non smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they’re not because they’ve been judged against this particular view of the mind. So we have twin pillars – economic and intellectual. And my view is that this model has caused chaos in many people’s lives; it’s been great for some, there have been people who have benefitted wonderfully from it. But most people have not. Instead they suffer this; this is the modern epidemic and it’s as misplaced and as it’s fictitious. This is the plague of ADHD. Now this is a map of the instance that ADHD in America or prescriptions for ADHD. Don’t mistake me, I don’t mean to say there is no such thing as Attention Deficit Disorder. I’m not qualified to say if there is such a thing. I know that a great majority of psychologists and paediatricians think there is such a thing, but it’s still a matter of debate. What I do know for a fact is it’s not an epidemic. These kids are being medicated as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out. And on the same whimsical basis and for the same reason – medical fashion. Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. They’re being besieged with information and calls for their attention from every platform computers, from iPhones, from advertising hoardings, from hundreds of television channels and we’re penalising them now for getting distracted. From what? Boring stuff at school, for the most part. It seems to me it’s not a coincidence totally that the incidence of ADHD has risen in parallel with the growth of standardised testing. Now these kids are being given Ritalin and Adderall and all manner of things, often quite dangerous drugs, to get them focused and calm them down. But according to this
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RSA Animate | Changing Education Paradigms

Attention Deficit Disorder increases as you travel east across the country. People start losing interest in Oklahoma, they can hardly think straight in Arkansas and by the time they get to Washington they’ve lost it completely. And there are separate reasons for that I believe. It’s a fictitious epidemic. If you think of it the arts, and I don’t say this exclusively, the arts, I think it’s also true of science and of maths, but I say about the arts particularly because they are the victims of this mentality currently – particularly. The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. And aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak, when you’re present in the current moment, when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing, when you’re fully alive. An anaesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself to what’s happening. And a lot of these drugs are that. We’re getting our children through education by anaesthetising them. And I think we should be doing the exact opposite. We shouldn’t be putting them asleep we should be waking them up to what they have inside of themselves. But the model we have is this. I believe we have a system of education that is modelled on the interests of industrialism and in the image of it. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Schools are still pretty much organised on factory lines; ringing bells, separate facilities, specialised into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches; we put them through the system by age group – why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are. It’s like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture. Well I know kids who are much better than other kids at the same age in different disciplines, or at different times of the day, or better in smaller groups than in large groups, or sometimes they want to be on their own. If you’re interested in the model of learning you don’t start from this production line mentality. It’s essentially about conformity and increasingly it’s about that if you look at the growth of standardised testing and standardised curricula and it’s about standardisation. I believe we’ve got to go in the exact opposite direction. That’s what I mean about changing the paradigm. There was a great study done recently of divergent thinking. It was published a couple of

years ago. Divergent thinking isn’t the same thing as creativity. I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Divergent thinking isn’t a synonym but it’s an essential capacity for creativity. It’s the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of possible ways of interpreting a question to think what Edward de Bono would probably call laterally – to think not just in linear or convergent ways. To seek multiple answers, not one. So there are tests for this, I mean, one kind of cod example would be people might be asked to say how many uses can you think of for a paper clip; one of those routine questions. Most people might come up with ten or fifteen. People who are good at this might come up with 200. And they’d do that by saying, “Well could the paperclip be 200 foot tall and made out of foam rubber?” “Does it have to be a paperclip as we know it, Jim?” Now they tested this and they gave them to 1,500 people in a book called Break Point and Beyond, and on the protocol of the test if you scored above a certain level you’d be considered to be a genius at divergent thinking. So my question to you is what percentage of the people tested of the 1,500 scored at genius level for divergent thinking. Now you need to know one more thing about them – these were kindergarten children. So what do you think? What percentage at genius level? 80? 98%. Now the thing about this was it was a longitudinal study, so they retested the same children five years later aged 8 to 10. What do you think? 50? They retested them again five years later, ages 13 to 15. You can see a trend here can’t you? Now this tells an interesting story because you could have imagined it going the other way could you? You start off not being very good but you get better as you get older. But this shows two things: one is we all have this capacity and; two, it mostly deteriorates. Now a lot of things have happened to these kids as they’ve grown up, a lot. But one of the most important things that has happened to them I’m convinced is that by now they’ve become educated. They’ve spent ten years at school being told there’s one answer it’s at the back and don’t look. And don’t copy because that’s cheating. Outside school that’s called collaboration no but inside schools… This isn’t because teachers want it this way it’s just
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RSA Animate | Changing Education Paradigms

because it happens that way. It’s because it’s in the gene pool of education. They have to think differently about human capacity. We have to get over this old conception of academic, nonacademic, abstract, theoretical, vocational and see it for what it is – a myth. Second, you have to recognise that most great learning happens in groups, that collaboration is the stuff of growth. If we atomise people and separate them and judge them separately we form a kind of disjunction between them and their natural learning environment. And thirdly, it’s crucially about the culture of our institutions, the habits of the institution and the habitats that they occupy.

RSA Animate | Changing Education Paradigms

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