Help brainstorming - Goals & Purposes of education

[tasksgirl]

Hey.. I have a class project on for Pol Sci about education.. my topic is Goals & Purposes of Education in the 21st century which I divided into 4 parts..

GOALS - What are some possible goals the education system could have to improve itself?

PURPOSES – What are the reasons that we have education? What purpose does/should it serve?

PROGRESS – How far have we come in our goals and purposes?

PROSPECTS – What does the future of education look like? What should it look like?

I know we have a bunch of teachers/parents in here so if you could help me brainstorm what are some of the ways the education system should improve? For example increase school safety, ensure reading profeciency, increase parent involvement.. etc. I got purposes & progress covered just a bit stuck on ways to improve..

[pluan]

I don't know if this helps you, but all three of my girls were fortunate to attend one of the best private schools in Baltimore. One of the minor things that I thought was so important was the requirement of wearing a standard uniform. It took the focus off of your economic status (my girls had beaucoup financial aide) and it took the focus off of who had the latest styles. It was also a help to parents with the cost of clothing. My girls each had three skirts each, which they wore all through high school. Cell phones had to be in your locker during the day as well as backpacks. No backpacks to be carried around all day, to control safety. The Headmistress was at the curb in the morning nearly every morning, if not her, a proxy, to welcome you to school every morning. Most likely that was to connect with the kids and the parents on a personal level. Maybe that would be hard to do in a public school , but not impossible.

[pluan]

Just to quickly add to that, my girls did attend public school also, but they didn't feel part of a community as they did at the stricter private school.
Hope that helped a little.

[slubberry]

One of the goals is to reverse the "everyone is special" mentality. It's so indoctrinated into the kids that even the parents are buying into it. It brings with it a "not my fault" attitude and sets the students for a big fall as their expectations don't meet with reality. They did a survey about a year ago and more than 60% of the parents believed that their kids are smart enough to get a full scholarship. We also need to reverse this trend about teaching too many topics without teaching the very basics and building a foundation. We as a nation have bought into this B.S. about falling behind other nations in math and science and our educators' answers are not to build a strong foundation but to cram as many topics as possible and leaving huge gaps in the foundation. In my school district, 6th graders have to be able to 3 variable algebra, by 10th grade, they're doing advanced statistical number theory. I was looking at some of the math problems and I had to refer back to my graduate work to figure out the proof for the pythagorean therom and they have to prove it at 10th grade.

As for the purpose of education, I'll give you the answer that my parents "brainwashed" me with and to which I am passing along to my son: The number one reason we educate ourselves and strive to better ourselves both physically and mentally is to help others that are not able. The priorities for others come in the following order; family, friends, neighbors, country, everyone else. The purpose of education is not to compete with others, but to compete with yourself to better yourself. The schools should be working on work ethics, i.e. work on a problem and keep hammering it until you solve it, not let your tutor work it out and give you a brief summary on how it is solved.

Progress at it stands, we've gone backwards from 40 years ago. Kids rely on calculators to do simple multiplication and division because they're so busy trying to solve multidimensional differential equations in high school.

At the current rate of "progress," we'll have just as high of a burnout rate as the other countries. The students of tomorrow may be like the kid on Star Trek but just like that kid, he'll be socially inept and not be able relate to problems in other countries. We'll even have less knowledge about the outside world since we have little time to learn anything outside of our own little lives. In effect, we'll be just like the stereotypical "American" who don't ( or more likely can't ) relate to other global issues. The world will become round again.