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What is the purpose of education?

Wherever you travel in the world, it is very common to hear the complaint that education systems don’t serve the needs of employers that the Learning Objectives we build into our education programmes aren’t relevant to employment or sufficient for economic growth.

But despite this common complaint, it is less common to find people who are actively seeking to define the specific Learning Objectives that are most important to build into education programmes the knowledge, skills, and qualities that we should be most concerned about developing in young people.

To define the most important Learning Objectives, it seems sensible to start by going back to the first claim – that education systems don’t effectively serve the needs of employers and economies – and to ask if economic aims are the most important aims. Or, rather, to ask What is the Purpose of Education? What is Education for? What are the ultimate aims of education?

With a robust answer to this question, it should then be possible to work back to define a specific set of Learning Objectives that are essential to the purpose of education.

And from these specific Learning Objectives, it would then make sense to agree how best to develop them in young people – to design learning experiences that are effective at meeting the Learning Objectives – and to design assessments that support their development.

In other words, the design of learning programmes / experiences should follow on from the definition of specific Learning Objectives and the Learning Objectives should follow and serve the ultimate aims of the education programme.

When you ask people the question What is Education for? you get all sorts of answers. People will often tell you that the main purpose of education is to help you get a job, get a better job, be competitive, become a leader, be successful, reach your goals, fulfil your potential, improve your chances in life, create opportunities in life, tackle your problems and challenges, take control of your life, make better choices, make your life a better life, be healthy and happy. Sometimes (but usually less often), you will find people who say that the purpose of education is to help you become a good citizen, to become a good person, or even to empower you make the world a better place.

The approach I took was to embrace all of the responses above within the claim that the purpose of education should be to improve our Quality of Life – that education systems, institutions and programmes should exist to empower and incline people to improve our Quality of Life – to help people be well and do well.

Having made this claim, the next task is to define what we mean by Quality of Life. There are difficulties here insofar as what Quality of Life means to you might be quite different to what Quality of Life means to another person –what is most important to you might not be what is most important to someone else – and, indeed, what is most important to you now might be different to what was most important to you yesterday. But these difficulties can be addressed by defining a flexible model that includes all of the elements that most probably define Quality of Life for anyone, anywhere, to a greater or lesser degree, at one time or another.

Although this approach is onerous, it is nevertheless possible, and after extensive research1, I developed the following model of Quality of Life, making a distinction between the extrinsic elements that define Quality of Life from the elements that are intrinsic to the 

1 For a list of research and other literature that informed this model, see Research Bibliography below

 

In this approach, the specific definitions of each of the elements of Quality of Life aggregate to form a grand (and unavoidably complex) definition of the ultimate purpose of education. By using this definition, I developed precise definitions of the Learning Objectives that are widely considered to most influence Quality of Life.

I use the term Mental Powers to denote these Learning Objectives -the knowledge, skills and other human qualities that are the principal determinants of our Quality of Life the mental powers that are most fundamental to a person being well and doing well:

Despite overwhelming evidence2 that these mental powers are absolutely fundamental to our quality of life… to personal, social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental wellbeing... and despite evidence that these powers can be nurtured in humans… it is very unusual to find explicit and systematic attempts to nurture them in young people anywhere in the world.

Parenting is largely improvised... and when we school children when the development of young people’s minds is at its most systematic the practice of schooling reflects a very narrow view of the human being… and of what is best for humanity.

For the majority of young people around the world, the experience of school is dominated by efforts first to become competent with words and numbers… and then to develop skills and earn academic qualifications which primarily function as permits to more schooling and (it is hoped) to certain kinds of job.

The prevailing concern is to push young people through the system from one stage of the education process to the next… and eventually out of the system and into the world of work.

When we take a less economic and individualistic view of how best to develop young people… where we try to develop better people and better minds we typically marginalise our efforts to corners of the curriculum and to extra-curricular initiatives… We rarely weave them throughout the everyday experience of young people.

Our priorities in school the ways in which we measure the effectiveness of schools and teachers and assess the achievement of young people reveal limited (and limiting) working conceptions of what it means to live a good life… of what wellbeing is… and of how the human mind determines our quality of life…

Conclusions. As a result of following this line of enquiry, I have reached the following conclusions:

  • the principal purpose of education should be to improve our quality of life… and we should imbue education systems with experiences that are explicitly designed to improve our quality of life where quality of life is understood in a rich, holistic and nuanced sense…a sense that takes into account important economic factors but in which the social nature and psychological determinants of wellbeing are given proper weight… experiences in which we aspire to a conception of quality of life that is broad enough to embrace ideals of happiness, peace, love, equity, freedom, democracy, and so
  • a primary objective of every school system, every school, and every teacher should be to empower and incline every young person to take control of their own wellbeing… and responsibility for our collective quality of life… to empower and incline every young person to be well and do well.
  • to help a person be well and do well, they should be equipped with a broad and rich understanding of what quality of life actually is… a sophisticated view of the world, their place in the world, and their influence on the world.
  • to help a young person be well and do well, they should to be enabled and inclined to use and control a wide range of mental powers… we need to nurture specific mental powers… we need to nurture young people’s minds… carefully, deliberately, and
  • to nurture young people’s minds in this way, they should be equipped with a deep awareness, familiarity and understanding of their mental powers…. a deep selfknowledge.
  • teachers, parents, and anyone else who influences the experience of young people and therefore influences the development of young people’s minds:
  • should be aware of their influence in the development or suppression of a young person’s mental powers
  • should understand the nature of their responsibility in shaping young minds and influencing quality of life
  • should be equipped with a deep understanding of our mental powers and how our powers influence our quality of life
  • should also be equipped with a rich understanding of what quality of life is… a sophisticated view of the world, our place in it, and our influence on it

Разделы знаний

International relations

International relations

Law

Philology

Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection between textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics.[

Technical science

Technical science