Friday, August 29, 2014

What is the main purpose of education?

I read this interesting article which raises some very interesting questions about the current academic environment in the USA, but I guess the same is true for any country's education system. Today's education system is heavily oriented towards acquiring skills required to get a job, they are becoming like vocational courses. The cost of education is very high today, so it is obvious that after going through this process of attending schools and college one should be able to secure a job that can pay off all the investment. One can ask, what is the real purpose of education? The question is very general and different people might answer it differently. For some, education might mean acquiring a new skill, for some, it might mean acquiring knowledge, and for some, it might mean getting a degree so that they can get a good job and social status. One of the major purposes of education is to acquire the skills to secure a job to survive in this world. But I guess the real crux of the question is, is this becoming the sole purpose of today's education? Are we trying to produce good workers, managers, and CEOs but somehow ignoring that we also need good humans?

In its true sense education is a continuous process. We start learning new things when we come into this world and keep on discovering something new, learning something new until we depart from here. But for now, let's focus only on school and college education. There is no doubt that today's education system is much better than what we had in the past, and credit must be given for the efforts to improve the system. I personally believe that my kids are exposed to a much better education system than I was. The system is very student-friendly, it tries to support the interests of students. The curriculum is heavily biased towards the job market, actually, this is not a problem in itself as one needs to acquire vocational skills, but at the same time, we need to train students to deal with many other important issues. The world is facing many problems like religious fundamentalism, stress, depression, lack of compassion and kindness towards other human beings, unequal distribution of wealth, political polarization, etc. These issues are very important and affect our society in many ways but unfortunately, the current education system doesn't take any concrete steps to educate students about many of these topics. At the same time, today's parents have become so busy that they can't devote enough time to educating their kids about these topics. In this changed scenario, there is much more responsibility on our education system not only to produce trained and skilled workers but also sensible humans who are good citizens of the world. If our education system can instill compassion and tolerance in its students, if it can stress the importance of equality and equity, if it can educate them about their rights and responsibilities then we will have a generation of sensible and sensitive citizens.

However, there is no easy solution to this problem, as I said current education system is much better than what we had in the past but the changed scenario of our society has made its job much more difficult and complicated. What I feel today is that parents or guardians of any student, who are a very important and critical component of this education system are not doing their part. Today's parents have many reasons starting from their business due to work, day-to-day stress of modern-day lifestyle, and pressure to fit into society's definition of a successful life for not having enough time to interact with their children. This is why I am saying that we can't depend on parents anymore to educate their children in an unbiased way. First, they don't have enough time and normally they try to instill only their own beliefs in their children. This is not wrong in every case but this is also not how we should be educating our kids. Kids need to know all sides of any problem or issue so that they can think of solutions to the problems independently which they will face in their lives. If parents bias the minds of their children we will lack free thinkers in the next generation and already we do not have many of them. With the easy availability of information, I expected more free thinkers, but somehow that is not happening, people are more siloed and read only that validates their beliefs, and stay away from everything that challenges them. I hope that current education also focuses more on the overall general development of students along with technical skill development. We need leaders who are free thinkers, we need entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, and artists who are also good humans. This is a very challenging task and there is no set formula to achieve all this but I believe that experts from the education field will come up with some design that will allow us to build a curriculum that will focus on the overall development of every student. I hope parents start realizing their responsibility and playing their part in this process. I believe that the main purpose of education is to produce intelligent, compassionate, skillful, and sensitive individuals and I really hope that we will be able to achieve this one day.

Thanks for reading and please share your views on this topic.

[Copyright: Vinay Thakur. Please contact the author for re-posting or publishing]

Links:
1. Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League

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