What is The Point of School?
Education is one of the tools to improve people’s quality. Education becomes a starting point to measure peoples’ intelligence. Everyone agree that someone who is well-educated might be has a high-prestige and high-status in their community. Getting education means entering schools. Schools should help young people to develop the capacities they will need to thrive better. Actually, what they need (and maybe they want) are: to be confidence to talk to strangers, to try things out, to handle tricky situations, to stand up for them selves, to ask for help, and to think new thoughts.
What Albert Einstein intended at his statement: “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything one learned at school” is those skills and attitudes. If your schools require you, lesson after lesson, to copy down facts, remember them accurately, and reproduce them when required, those are the skills of note-taking, memorization, and the attitude of unquestioning acceptance that you are practicing.
So, what school is for? Mr. Godin answered that there are a few possibilities to answer the question. School is to create a society that culturally coordinated, to further science and knowledge and pursue information; enhance civilization while giving people the tools to make decision; and the last, to train people to become workers.
Godin said that schools usually give awesome job only at the first goal out of four goals mentioned. Hence, the first three goals that commonly be ignored are: to a society create coordinated; to pursuit of knowledge for its own sake; and the tools to make smart decision.
A culturally coordinated society: The school is not as good as what shown at the television. There are huge gap between the cultural experience in the under-funded schools, over crowded city school, and well-funded schools in the suburbs. There are significant chasms in something as simple as whether you think the scientific method is useful-where you went to school says a lot about what you were taught. If the school’s goal is to create a foundation for common culture, it has not delivered atneraly the level it is capable of.
The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake: We spend a fortune teaching trigonometry try to kids who do not understand it, will not use it, and will spend no more of their lives studying Math. We invest thousands of hours exposing millions of students to fiction and literature, but at the of the course most of them never read again even though for having fun.
The tools to make smart decisions: Even though just about everyone in the West has been through years of compulsory schooling, we see ever more belief in unfounded theories, bad financial decisions, and poor community and family planning. People’s connection with science and the arts is tenuous at best, and the financial acumen of the typical consumer is pitiful. If the goal was to raise the standards for rational thought, skeptical investigation, and useful decision making, we have failed for most of our citizens.
Finally, it is clear that school was designed with a particular function in mind, and it is one that school has delivered for several hundred years ago. Now, what is the point of school then? Let’s answer by our own heart.
Dimuat juga di:
http://eramadina.com/what-is-the-point-of-school/
References:
What’s the Point of School by Guy Claxton
Stop Stealing Dreams by Seth Godin
Author : Dina Fauziah (Demisioner Head of Public Relation KAMMI Madani 2012/2013)
