Concerns about the end of education

This is a time of ends. For years we've been talking about the end of just about everything, but the word itself has two very distinct meanings, and which one is meant in any given phrase in which it is used. Ah yes, there's always a bit of twist in just about everything we say and do.

The word "end" has to primary meanings, namely the stopping point of a temporal experience or event (as in Judgment Day is what many believe will be the end of the world.), or the goal or purpose of something (as in The ends should justify the means.) So, which one am I talking about here? And is so often the case, the answer is, "well, both, sort of."

If a person can learn things, acquire skills and develop competences without having to go through a formal process to do so; if a person will most like do these things more often than not outside of formal educational systems or processes, the we have to ask ourselves just what good is a school, in this case a vocational-training institution? Are they needed at all? If a person can get recognition elsewhere for what s/he can do or is capable of, then it doesn't take much more thinking to realize that the school, as we generally understand it, becomes rather superfluous rather quickly. In a sense, then, this is the end of education (in the first sense of the word).

Of course, if this is the end of the institution, then we have to ask ourselves if the institution serves any purpose, any end (in the second sense of the word), if it has any reason for existing at all. We would be justified, it would seem, in raising the question of the real end of education, as we now understand it. If I can get what I need elsewhere, why do I have to support a large apparatus that is providing no real value? This is a legitimate (though short-sighted question) and it is one which an increasing number of people are thinking maybe we don't.

The Late Enlightenment and Early Industrial Age thought that an educated public was crucial to the success of a functioning democracy. Citizens who could read newspapers, think for themselves, form opinions and express them were considered a necessary, if sometimes uncomfortable, element of a democratic society. It was generally agreed that each and every person should have the opportunity to learn to read, write, and reckon (the 3 R's), and it later turned out that having a basic understanding of literature, science and mathematics would help everyone get along better in the modern world. In other words, society decided that everyone would be better off if everyone knew more. The school of the Late Enlightenment, of course, looked very different from the school of the Industrial Age, and with the current rapid development of technology, especially information technology, we realize that our current notion of school may be at its end, because the end it has to serve needs to be redefined.

What we have seen in the last few posts is that there is shift of thinking taking place from the "old style", (for us) traditional forms of education which was input oriented (e.g. subject-centered ... so many hours of math, science, literature, phys. ed., etc.) to one that is output oriented. This reorientation brings with it the obsolesence of large portions of the education undertaking, and it is time for us to start thinking about what the education for tomorrow should look like. It should also be clear by now, that the mere requirements of business, the demands of capital, the specifications of employers cannot be the answer: too much of what they want can be gotten outside the structure of formal education. But, if we are to preserve our societies, then we need to think hard about what education means and what it will look like in the future.

I hate to say it so tritely, but our entire future depends on it.