Pretty basic: In order to get what we want from Education, we need to know what we want. We need to have a goal or a set of goals. If we don't have well-understood goals, we are not likely to ever approach them. Even if by chance we reached a worthy goal, we wouldn't know it, so we wouldn't be any less frustrated.
A few nagging questions:
What are the goals of Education where your kids study?
Is it clear if values are a goal? Which values? Is there a consensus regarding these values? It's unlikely the answer is Yes to all.
Imparting knowledge is probably part of any Educational methodology's. What knowledge is important for your kids to have 5-15-30 years into the future? Is it the same knowledge that was important for you 5-15-30 years into the past?
Same about skills.
How about just keeping the kids out of harm's way? I am often taken aback by indication from fellow parents that they would settle for institutionalized babysitting. We can get more than that out of 13 years.
Also featured: Ability to learn, Creating the Tendency to learn, indoctrination into society, socialization, and quite a few other possible sub-goals best expressed in specialized jargon.
We may want all of the above, and maybe we can even get all of the above one way or another. But first we must state the goals clearly to ourselves. Then maybe we can start building the education framework to approach them.
A well thought-out analysis of such goals in the terms of "the desired graduate" can be found in Gavriel Salomon's 2001 book: Technology and education in the age of information.
Every society and every parent may have different ideas about the worthiest goals. The nightmarish danger is that without discussing what we want, we would default into a low common denominator.
But this can't really happen, can it?
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