Bare Necessities - A summary

Only one thing is worse than stating the obvious. It's summarizing the obvious. So here it is:

Educating - whether a single child or the masses - is a complex task. Without some method, it will be madness.

• Know where you are going - Goals
  
• Without knowing where you are going, you are not very likely to get there. In the case of an education system: What do we want our graduates to know, to be able to do, to tend to do, to have done, etc.


• These goals, by nature, are not constant. The goals change in time as society change; the goals vary according to the segment of society, etc.
  This is why "where we are going" - our goals - must be re-evaluated occasionally


• It's an ongoing process


• Know where you are - Measurement


• Without knowing the starting point, it's unlikely you will go in a direction that will lead us closer to our goal. But this is just at the first instance: As soon as we do anything - make any change in the whole education system, or even just teach one class a single subject - we are in a different place. We need to check where we are now, and update our direction.


• Even the way we measure the state of our education system may change from time to time. For example, if we add a goal of creativity, we need to be able to measure something completely new and different than measuring knowledge


• This is also an ongoing process


• Know what you are doing - Research


• In education, we don't have a recipe for getting from here to there for any conceivable here and there. We constantly find ourselves with new student, new teachers, new material to teach, new targets imposed by politicians and/or international testing, new events, new knowledge, new fashions... We always try to find our way in not-completely-charted waters


• Those of us who don't have reliable access to divine intuition, need some kind of method. A systematic way to devise a possible course of action, try it, see what happens, and learn from it. This way, if we are successful, we can repeat the success, and if we are not successful, we can try to see what went wrong, modify our action, and try again. This is can be used as a crude description of Applied Research


• Educational research must also be an ongoing process, since it keeps trying to bring us from our ever-changing current state to our occasionally-changing goals

Looking at the three imperatives above, it is clear that they are quite universal. Not just education, but any non-trivial endeavor can be said to based on these guidelines: Know where you are, where you are going, and what you are doing to get from her to there.