K Bechtel

In researching the purposes of education I discovered this PowerPoint Presentation which describes four purposes for education in America. 

1. Education for Intellectual Attainment:  This purpose can be categorized as using schools to develop, exercise, or stimulate the minds of the students.
2. Education for Citizenship:  Schools exist to benefit society in that they help create citizens that can function in the American democracy, thus sustaining the American economic and political systems.
3. Education for Vocational Preparation:  This purpose of school is to train students to be ready to enter the workforce or prepared to enter college.  Either way, students are prepared to be productive workers.
4. Education for Individual Development:  This belief stems from the idea that education serves as one’s vehicle for success.  Schools recognize the uniqueness of each student and directs each student to their potential physically, emotionally, and intellectually.

This same presentation went on to discuss The Seven Principles of Education designed to set forth goals beyond just preparing students for college. 

1. Health:  The health of our country can be greatly impacted by presenting health issues to students in schools, such as health classes, nutrition, drug/alcohol/tobacco education, sex education, and physical education classes.
2. Command of Fundamental Processes:  This is the old 3 Rs in education insuring students know how to read, write, and do basic math by the time they leave school.
3. Worthy Home Membership:  This is teaching students both male and female how to create a healthy, stable home as adults through courses such as home economics.
4. Workforce Ready:  Students are prepared to enter the workforce upon graduating from high school.
5. Citizenship:  Our democracy is dependent on an educated citizenry and the school is the place where students are taught how to be responsible citizens.
6. Worthy Use of Leisure Time:  Schools teach students what constitutes a healthy lifestyle including healthy leisure activities.
7. Ethical Character:  Schools teach students what is right and wrong based on the values and beliefs of our culture, which is still up for debate.

The presentation goes on to list several issues of concern today for educators in thinking about what is important for students to know and be able to do.  It suggested the following abilities that students today should gain from education.

1. How to acquire, analyze and use information
2. Concept development: concentrating on the big ideas rather than memorizing details
3. Problem solving using real life situations
4. Promoting inquiry based learning and the idea of constructivism
5. Social Concerns:  Social issues are often dealt with in schools.  For example, when obesity rates are on the rise we see an increase in nutrition and physical fitness activities at school and changes in the school lunch program.

In another PowerPoint Presentation, the same four major purposes of education are listed. 

So education serves society in that it does produce citizens that can think, work, contribute to society, and preserve our culture.  It serves as the vehicle for success in that it teaches students how to solve problems, how to work with others, what is acceptable behavior, and how to manage many things at one time. 

I have finished the book by Papert, and I am glad to be finished with it.  Although he made some great points throughout the book, I felt like he was totally bashing school without offering any real solution.  Yes, he provided excellent examples of learning opportunties from his own personal experiences to those of real students, but I just don’t think these are examples of the ultimate learning process.  I think learning really is a personal issue in that each student brings with them unique talents and interests and preferred ways of learning.  That’s one reason why teaching a classroom of kids is so hard.  We ( I mean teachers) classify every lesson as one size fits all, and obviously that is absurd.  I do believe many of the things that are done in the classroom are motivated by state and national guidelines and assessment data.  Papert was right when he said that much of what we learn is not on the state assessment. 

One of the most important points Papert made in the whole book in my opinion was on p. 123 when he said, ” Knowing that one can exercise choice in shaping and reshaping one’s intellectual identity may be the most empowering idea one can ever achieve.”  This is something not understood by my students nor their parents.  In a recent blog by Clarence Fisher, he talks about how important it is to give students the opportunity to be in charge or at least part of the what students learn and how they learn it.  He says, They (students) must become evaluators and creators of information; active and critical consumers and collectors, but the fact is that they need the opportunities to do these things and in classrooms, they aren’t often given. I think this is one route to the mega-change Papert speaks about. 

I have joined My Space and I do have mixed feelings about the use of it.  On a positive note, I have been able to connect with friends from high school and college and family members around the world.  This is nice.  It’s great to just hang out with these people and see what they’re up to.  I enjoy looking at their profiles and their friends list.  It’s interesting to see who people have in their list of friends.  My space certainly doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that other pages have, but I know I could spruce it up a bit.  It is a great way to network with people you know and may not be able to see all the time.  It’s also a great way to find other people who may have similar interests or questions as you.

On a not so positive note, I believe that My Space is no place for kids.  I think in the Boyd interview she said that social networking sites such as My Space were created with college students as the intended users.  This is appropriate in my opinion.  As I add my ten and eleven year old students to my friends list though, I find that their profiles contain a lot of false information about themselves.  In looking at students I’ve had in the past, they too mislead others in the information they list in their profiles.  I also have a problem with the fact that although my intent is to hang out with people I know, I have access to a whole lot of people I don’t know.  Many profiles are available for me to look at that contain filthy and vulgar language, offensive lyrics to songs, and content that just isn’t appropriate for kids.  I believe many parents have no idea what is in their kids’ profiles, in their friends’ profiles, or in the profiles of strangers that may be accessed with ease.  I really think the site is inaappropriate for kids to use without parental supervision.

After reading this chapter, I think of the word authentic.  How many authentic reasons do we give our students to learn?  Are students learning things that interest them?  Why is it that Johnny never turns in any of his work?  I think Johnny needs to see a real reason in knowing whatever it is I want him to learn.  I think of my own children, 5 and nearly 2 years old, and how many minutes they will sit in front of a video game.  I have argued with my husband about this because I see it as such a waste of time.  He sees it a challenging learning experience.  It drives them to want to learn more and more.  It’s pretty amazing to see.  Imagine having students in your classroom with this same kind of drive.

One interesting point in this chapter that I must mention is the fact that the author says technology can support mega-change in schools by shucking off the technical nature of School learning.  Learning is a natural occurrence, but it isn’t described as such at school.  The very thing that could help bring about change in school is turned into another interference.  When he describes in this chapter about how taking the computers out of classrooms and putting them into a lab with a curriculum did the students no good, I have seen that in other areas of school as well.  We have many resources that we miss the purpose of and end up losing their benefit on student learning.  He really made some interesting points.

After reading Chapter 2 and several occasions in which the author described some of his own learning experiences, I began to think about some of my own experiences.  I remember in 4th grade thinking how much fun school was.  Up to that point, I don’t think I knew that school could be fun.  My teacher in 4th grade though taught me that learning doesn’t have to be something that happens in your seat in front of a textbook.  We had many opportunities to learn that year and many learning moments in my mind were just plain accidents.  I really felt like I was just playing most of that year.  After that year though, learning meant sitting in my seat and receiving the knowledge the teacher would allow me to have.  And just like a deposit in the bank, once I had learned it, I moved on to a new topic.  I didn’t use it.  I didn’t really know I was supposed to.

The next time I really remember a learning moment was in high school in a Calculus class.  The teacher really was hard but that meant he really made me think.  Up to that point, thinking at school was minimal.  School was more like a script.  The teacher talked for a while and then I regurgitated what he or she said on some kind of paper or worksheet.  My Calculus teacher though changed that.  He answered my questions with another question.  “Why was he so mean?” I would think to myself.  Why can’t he just tell me the answer or tell me how to get it right?  Well getting it right was not his concern at all.  He was more driven to teach me to think about the problem and possible solutions than just getting it right.

College classes also gave me thinking experiences.  Although I had taken Calculus in high school, I really didn’t feel like I could do it.  I took Algebra as my first math course in college, and finally developed a moment of real understanding.  I had taken Algebra as a freshman in high school and here I was taking it again in college, but I was so glad I did.  I finally got it!  I could not only do the problems but I understood why I was doing them that way.  I have always appreciated that moment.

So for me learning has meant 2 very different and independent things.  At times it has meant doing something and getting it right.  That would be the school definition of learning.  However, a few teachers out there have not cared if I got it right or not.  They wanted to see evidence of my thinking skills.  So I ask myself, am I asking students to do things to get the right answer?  When was the last time I asked them to think?  Do we expect students to really think?  I don’t think I really want to know the answers to these questions. 

Throughout this chapter I kept trying to classify myself as either a schooler or a yearner.  I so badly want to be totally yearner, but the truth is I’m a hypocritical mesh of both.  What I say I believe comes from the yearner perspective, however what I actually do looks a lot like a schooler.  I say I take a constructivist approach to learning in my classroom, but I am explicit in my directions to students on what they should learn each day.  I believe change can help make bad situations better, but I know change is sometimes difficult and do not embrace it.  I say I do not want my students to simply be consumers of education, however, I teach as if that is what they are.  When I am unable to be at school, I want a substitute that can do all the new methods utilized and use the  technological toys in my classroom and I think this will be difficult to find someone to maintain the amount of normalcy in my absence.  It isn’t.  Retired teachers to brand new ones can pull off what I do without a hitch.  And to think I thought I was different….

I remember my first year of teaching.  I went in to that definitely believing I was a Yearner.  In fact, I was not only going to change my classroom and school, I was going to change the whole world.  I remember thinking of things I would not do as a classroom teacher.  Now 9 years later, where is that ideology?  Reality has made me see that school wasn’t  that bad.  I mean look at me.   I turned out ok, didn’t I?  I truly have never seen anything other than school work so it is hard for me to picture the flip side of it.

Is it though just a flip side?  Can teachers take on this approach or another?  It is actually deeper than that.  When you think of change, schools experience it all the time, so we say.  We have school improvement plans that do things better for this next class of students.  We have school-wide and district-wide initiatives that change how we’ve been doing things.  But do these things actually change anything?  When it comes down to it, teachers fill their classrooms and do what they want to do, what they are comfortable doing. 

So Papert has written an excellent first chapter.  He’s got me hooked.  I so want to learn how to change what I do to allow students to learn better.  I want to fly!