Education reform

http://www.good.is/post/is-education-reform-effective-depends-on-the-definition/

like hipsters, the purpose of education is easier to define in the negative (what it shouldnt accomplish), but ill try anyway. most generally, to produce citizens of democracy and of "the world"... that is, people who are able to make informed decisions on their own, think critically, creatively, and independently. education should explore not only the vast depth of what previous people have thought and done, but should also make you explore your own thoughts and actions by encouraging you to develop reasoning for why you have those thoughts, or provide paths for you to change your opinions/views on the world if they were previously based on ignorance. education should expand peoples mind to not only what is, but what isnt and what could be. a true education fosters a love for learning, an ability to learn for oneself, to judge the quality of one's own work, to be open-minded, and to have an understanding and appreciation of different perspectives, cultural or otherwise.

there is of course a million other things that could be said, but at this point we can stop and ask the natural question: how would you accomplish this? and furthermore, how would you determine that this goal was accomplished? these are difficult questions, ones that i certainly dont know the answer to, but i have my own ideas about... but to finish off i might as well throw out there the idea that i dont think there is any way to measure the success of such an education as was described above. in my opinion, the act of measuring the success of education, which puts an end goal on it, would distort the process away from pure discovery and exploration, and instead focus on the end goal.

is this a contradiction? to say that education has a goal, but then deny it by not focusing on it? i think its a necessary one. zen, if you will. one can have goals, but seek to achieve them "by accident," that is say, naturally. to design a system to achieve and insure the outcome of those goals is the surest way to prevent them from happening.

to be more concrete: the trap we've fallen into is the belief that we need to have some sort of oversight on the quality of education. once we decide that we need some objective metric, then testing naturally comes into the picture. but the problem is this: someone who really understands something can do well on the test, but someone who does well on the test does not necessarily understand the subject at all. so focusing on doing well on a test does not necessarily correlate to understanding the material. a test is a limited subset of the subject, the tip of the iceberg. but theres so much more beneath the surface that is lost. instead, it would be better to just learn for its own sake, without any pressure. then, if by chance you were to test those students, i think they would do better, but it wouldnt even matter.

an implicit assumption most people have is that the end goal of education is our economic prosperity. this too, i think, is misguided. focus on just pure learning for its own sake, and the talented and inspired people produced will prosper, as will everyone around them.