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The End of Education?
Much of the personal wealth of the teachers, staff and students there is focused on getting good examination results above any developing the potential of individuals - as if there was time for this anyway given the workload ! The curriculum is strictly controlled and still based on knowledge and conformity over developing personal values and developing individual creativity / potential / interest.
Prince Charles is right on the ball concerning his comments on education. The development of human potential is a crucial issue on 21st century Earth.
I attended a conference on the role of the Learning Skills Council (LSC, responsible for the Further Education of 16yrs+ adults) in the voluntary sector and then emailed a senior member of the LSC to enquire whether or not 'the development of human potential' was part of their educational remit.
I cannot publish the reply email here due to copyright restrictions they impose but can report that I was directed to the 'key tasks' of the LSC which are all related to numbers of people achieving particular levels of qualifications, not 'human potential'. Any personal benefit to the learner's own potential is secondary to the output of qualifications. As a qualified adult educator who had come 'into the business' I felt at a loss because an interest in developing human potential is what had led me into FE lecturing as a career.
Why was I attending this conference? I had completed a unit of my masters degree in education, titled 'Adult Learning in Community - Education or Indoctrination?' My conclusions led me to quit my employment as a lecturer in F.E. and set up a community college in my local town with the help of Plymouth University RATIO Scheme.
I saw that much provision in the education sector was, and continues to be, actually anti-educational. For many people it provides little more than a lifelong distrust of formal learning experiences with their dictated assessments, milestones, targets, outputs, cohorts and so on. The percentage that 'make-it' educationally to doctorates is relatively small and how relevant is this to human potential? By then their level of specialisation and integration into 'the system' often prevents any innovative thinking and any change to the system itself. Creative input into the educational system at FE levels is often blocked and has been since the last Educational Reform Act. Even Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State for Education at that time, was heard to utter concerns about the future of 'creativity in learning'.
Dr. A Bartlett Giamatti was once President of Yale University and included in his freshman address:
I believe a liberal education is an education in the root meaning of liberal - liber, 'free' - the liberty of the mind free to explore itself, free to draw itself out, to connect with other minds and spirits in the quest for truth. Its goal is to train the whole person to be at once intellectually discerning and humanly flexible, toughminded and open hearted; to be responsive to the new and responsible for values that make us civilised. It is to teach us to meet what is new and different with reasoned judgement and humanity.
Education in its ideal sense is a positive force for human evolution, in that if we are 'going somewhere', as individuals, communities or as a species, it can help us discover the way through exploring both knowledge and values together. My own experience as a college lecturer is that formal education generally seems to be getting further away from this 'discovery' ideal and more rigid and dogmatic in its application, although there are notable exceptions to this, usually found in unique teachers who are adaptive to the situation and fired-up with their subject. Despite the system they pass on to their students enthusiasm and 'inspiration' for a subject.
For example the 'StarFields Network' on which this article originated is an excellent example of non mainstream 'education' geared towards the development of human potential. A whole host of tools are on offer here to help you explore values, integrate and evolve. The 'outcomes' of the learning experiences available on this network are based in you rather than some externally (government) controlled criteria. Similarly a whole industry has developed outside of mainstream education - which roots itself in the learners' aims, values and experience.
The formal educational system we still have has emerged from pedagogic 'transmission' of knowledge based on training small boys for the priesthood 500 years ago. There is no time for 'learning by experience', self-guided learning, applying reflection, experiment and theory to activity here. Learning by experience, truly the 'only way to learn' is bypassed in preference to 'accepted' knowledge regurgitated in a pre-ordained format, like training a parrot to talk. There is no longer any time for individual tutoring to help individuals beyond anything but their conformity to the exigencies of the system that increasingly serves economic outcomes. And all this when it has become completely obvious that our economy is founded on the stupidest of all flaws - using its assets (the earths finite resources) as income.
There are many other educational models. For example the work of 'The Prince's Trust' is way ahead of this anti-educational mission in conformity by actually helping young people to gain experiences they want. Schumacher College in Dartington also provides an excellent example of a new approach to education outside of the system. Students take time to develop their own agendas, methodologies and philosophies of learning. Examples like the 'Small School' in Bideford, Devon, and other brilliant works by Satish Kumar, or Steiner's work in education are a torch we should carry to the Learning Olympics.
These all share a starting place rooted in the values and experiences of the learner, which are ignored in mainstream education. New qualification targets imposed by government and ratified by industrial bodies aim to train as much of the population as they can in order to appear more economically competitive in a global market. Training programs such as BTEC, GNVQ, NVQ and C&G are based on students attaining competencies, a sort of rational checklist of abilities construed to increase conformity in employees.
Eliot in Action Research for Educational Change criticises the assumptions of the Educational Reform Act which bought these qualifications and new targets into being.
An educational system which exclusively aims to transform people into commodities for consumption on the labour market must treat them in turn as passive consumers. The curriculum will consist of objects to be possessed in the form of facts and skills rather than objects of thought: situations, problems and issues which are capable of challenging, activating and extending natural powers of being.
As the pace of technological change steps up it is effecting work and employment in many ways, we have only just begun to see the effect of technology on both industrial production and the service industries. Has your job been 'outsourced' yet ? The 'new qualifications' we have do not increase the initiative, creativity or innovative traits that every one of us needs right now to face change on 21st Century Earth. Creativity is an essential resource for making new options as much as conserving traditions. In the context of economic and environmental breakdown a workforce of conformists who are unable to see and question 'the bigger picture' are little more than a force for entropy.
We all have immense creative potential. The system sucks us into money, and spends our energy and the taxes on it in ways we hate. There has to be another way. We will presently find it in experience rather than formal 'education'. And there is no better learning experience than the chaos we presently face on Mother Earth.
So the current cry from the system of 'Get Educated Now' offers little help. When the remedy is 'Education, Education, Education', the reality is 'Training, training, training'. Formal education is now 'something you get' rather than 'something you find'. Real education is something that happens every minute, every second and is rooted in and interfaces with your own needs and values. 'Education' has been hijacked by formal 'suppliers' in a system that all but ignores creativity and the development of values in preference to industrial outputs.
In 'Adults Learning', Jenny Rogers the author describes this process of experiential learning as being central for adults:
All learning is best done through active involvement. Imagine that you are a non driver and that you want to learn how to drive. There are three methods open to you: to go to a lecture where a tutor tells you how to do it, to watch a skilled driver at work, or to practice in a real car with a teacher at your side. Would you have any hesitation about which method to choose?
What is true for driving, a 'sensory motor skill' is equally true of every other kind of learning, whether it is cognitive or behavioural. The only effective way is to learn by doing.
So where has the system become lost? Why is the educational system still based around pedagogy? Knowles gives us a historical context for pedagogic transmission. He states the Greeks invented Socratic dialogue as an aid to learning, where a member of the group would pose a question to be explored by the group mind. Now there is no time for this, no room for the development of new methodologies and the exploration of creative options. The Roman system we have is more confrontational and develops 'polarities in argument' which we can still see in our political and education system today. It removes all colour and gives us only black or white.
Information surrounds us, we swim daily through lakes of the stuff and have to set up perceptual screens to avoid its clamour. Instead of helping us find our way through this clamour by educating us into our own values, our own liberty, the educational system is here still creating factory fodder for an industrial age which is already over.
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