Educational Foundations

Many brilliant people believe they are not.  What is it that gets some kids into good colleges and others not?  Okay, so they are supposedly smart students and hard workers, but how did they get that way?  Motivation plays the largest factor.  The second 16th century group's presentation got me thinking.

Our education system is structured in a way that makes assumptions about students.  These assumptions can alter the willingness or the self-confidence necessary to demonstrate capabilities.  Additionally, it is often hard to say that capabilities are even being assessed properly.  I feel that one evidence of such assumptions is the implementation of forced bell-shaped curves.  A forced bell curve is a literal manifestation of how some are expected to excel while others lag behind, when in reality all within reason can excel.  There is no doubt that students need to be prepared for an economically competitive world, but it is my belief that a child's educational foundation should be first based on competition with oneself rather than with others.  Comparison with others can promote progress for some in the group, but comparison with oneself can promote progress in all.  Children are already too caught up enough in how they compare to their peers, so why would we contribute to this eminent problem at this stage in their lives?  With a self-actualizing foundation at a young age, individuals can have the base they need to compete with others in the competitive society of today.

Children start their first years of school at different educational levels from one another.  I feel this is due partly to personal capabilities but also significantly due to different parenting methods.  I'm not going to crack open the nature vs. nurture egg, so just assume that both are contributors.  Our educational system needs to do a better job at addressing these immediate differences in starting points by not completely swamping children with ending points.  Ending points are great when they do not expect too much or too little

If my ideas are starting to sound anti-capitalist, let me explain.  I am certainly not factoring out personal agency as a determinate of personal educational progress.  In fact, in the majority of cases, individuals definitely carry the most massive portion of their futures in learning.  However, this just means that it is the role of educational systems to develop an environment that promotes good educational choices since the choices cannot be made for them.

"No such thing bad student, only bad teacher" were Mr. Miyagi's famous words.  I agree with this but only because I believe that the student has a partial role as the teacher as well, and this role is his agency.  An instructor or educational system can do everything in its capability, but at some point agency is has to come into play.  Jesus was the perfect teacher, yet his 'students' were not.  But they CAN become perfected through Him.

A quote from my book about Isaac Newton stood out to me.  Newton wrote in a letter to Robert Hooke, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."  Among other things, this says to me is that not only does education prosper when it's not competitive between individuals, but education does prosper when it is collaborative between individuals.

Be sure to check out Changing Education Paradigms  if you haven't already!

Also, this is Wikipedia but the tab "Educational Economies in the 19th Century" gives a great description of the inequality within solely private educational systems.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_reform