Welcome to Purpos/ed. We’ve been bursting at the seams waiting for this day to come when we can share with you our hopes, dreams and plans about sparking a debate about the purpose of education!
We’re delighted to have onboard Prof. Keri Facer of Manchester Metropolitan University (and formerly of Futurelab). Keri gave an inspirational keynote to the JISC Innovating e-Learning conference 2010 questioning the purpose of educational institutions. After much discussion this led directly to us working on setting up Purpos/ed. Her exhortation to get involved (along with some very pertinent questions) can be found below.
Much, much more to come – but for now, make sure you’ve signed up to the newsletter and you’re following @purposeducation on Twitter! We’ll keep you informed.
Doug Belshaw & Andy Stewart (Kickstarters, Purpos/ed)
What is education for? This, as Philip Larkin might once have said, is the sort of question that brings the priest and the doctor running across the fields in their long coats. Or at least, the education experts, the pundits, the industrialists with an axe to grind, the revolutionaries wanting new worlds, and, occasionally, the students, parents and community members whose lives might be most immediately affected.
Everyone seems to have an opinion on education. Everyone knows what’s wrong with it, from the disenchanted educator to the frustrated parent. Everyone knows which bit of madness they’d like to tweak, which daft policy they’d get rid of, which irritant they’d soothe.
But where do all these voices and these concerns come together to listen to each other, to resolve their concerns, to reach consensus or at least understand the nature of their disagreements? Where is the forum where we take a look not only at the parts but at the big picture of educational purpose?
Today, we seem to have lost our capacity to have an informed public debate on the big picture questions about education. Instead, in the popular media we see the annual ritual surrounding exam results exam results and the tired old debates over teaching early literacy. The recent public protests over the future of HE didn’t ask what university education was for, simply how to pay for it. The recent government White Paper on education felt no need to offer a vision vision of educational purpose, other than the desire to score more highly on league tables designed by economists in which half the countries don’t play by the rules. The think tanks tend to operate within one ideology or delight in playing off opinions and anecdotes against each other without moving the debate forward.
There is an urgent need to have a serious public debate about the purpose of education that doesn’t simply divide itself neatly into opposing camps rehashing the familiar arguments between progressives and traditionalists. There is an urgent need to have a serious public debate about the purpose of education that builds bridges between students, educators and the wider public. It is not enough to proclaim that education is a public good and should be protected, when it is clear that some students take their education and translate it into employment that radically exploits those who have paid for it. It is not enough to proclaim that education is a personal matter, when without an educated, intelligent population, we cannot expect long term security or wellbeing for anyone.
The next couple of decades bring serious challenges. They bring economic challenges that will require us to think carefully about the relationship between education, enterprise and society. They bring demographic change that threatens to undermine the intergenerational contract and that unsettles the assumption that adults will always have young people’s best interests at heart. They bring technological change that throws up into the air our ideas about intelligence, about human-machine relationships, about what it means to ‘be human’. They bring environmental and energy challenges that require us to develop the creativity, ingenuity and compassion for more sustainable ways of life.
We’re not going to address these challenges through a hollowed out and polarised debate about education. Nor are we going to address them by thinking that education is the universal panacea that will fix all of these issues on its
own. Instead, we need to create mature public space where we can start to think creatively about the sorts of futures we want to see, the sorts of capacities that this will require from us as individuals, as citizens, as workers and as parents, and the sorts of education that we therefore need to build. I very much hope that this site can start to develop that debate.
In the hope that these ideas might be achieved, I’d like to suggest some questions that contributors to the site could explore:
- What is your vision for the good society?
- What is the part that education can play in achieving that and what is the part that others need to play? Who are these others? What is/what should be their relationship to education?
- What are the building blocks we have in our schools and universities already that could move them towards that role?
- What are the building blocks outside formal education?
- What are the impediments to change and what causes them? And are there good reasons for these?
- What can I see of merit in the ideas of those who disagree with me?
- Do the ideas I suggest draw on the expertise and insight of others?
- Do the ideas I suggest offer enough benefit to outweight the disruption that they would cause in their realisation? how would we get there?
opening the debate: “What is the part that education can play in achieving [the good [...]
This is a great start Keri – thanks. I’ll be contributing in a couple of weeks and I’ll be sure to revisit your questions.
The (potentially) educated, their loved ones, the educators, the institutions and their multiple sources of funding (including the potentially educated in the case of HE) will have various views on the good society and how education can achieve it. Just as the chattering classes are pretty successful in maximising the outcomes of education for their offspring, I like to think of an aim of education as being to encourage individual students to milk the system for all it is worth – active agents of learning. Let’s help make heroes. Of course we also need to be a good society where everyone deserves to be encouraged and ‘educated’ to a level where they can make their own choices about what they do in their lives. The really knotty question is how that can be maximised.
Fantastic initiative, thank you for setting it up. I shall add it to my list of “Things I’m a bit jealous of and wish I’d done myself, but then am very happy you did it so I don’t have to”.
I shall also copy Keri’s questions and work on my 500 words.
It would be great to get some children to give their answers too.
Hi Pascale, thanks for the positive comments. And we’re glad to have made your list (although it’s not really about *us*!)
This is a great initiative. I believe that conducting this debate through new media is very powerful. Today we see people in some parts of the world using new media as a tool to communicate and organise in order to bring about political change. Although our political institutions are not perfect I do not believe that radical change to the system is necessary. Education is a different matter though as our current system creates an educational under class; not of individuals who lack ability or creative potential but individuals who are denied the opportunity, for a whole host of reasons, to access education. Let’s keep the party going. Let’s ensure a healthy debate that brings about a non-partisan consensus on the best and fairest education system for a good and fair society.
I find myself objecting to the first two questions as being leading. It assumes that the purpose of education is to engineer some particular type of society. Not only do I reject this assumption, but I think it can be quite a harmful one.
Great! Thanks for engaging. Could you perhaps flesh out (perhaps in a #500words contribution) what you mean by ‘leading’? What do you object to? It’s all about the debate!
By “leading”, I mean it encourages people to give a particular answer, i.e. it encourages people to say that the purpose of education is to engineer a particular type of society.
The 500 words will be on my blog in a few days time.
We look forward to it! Inspiration and imagining are different from engineering, I’d suggest.
The 500 words are up.
We can, of course, use the language of religion and art rather than engineering when talking about social change. However, when we are talking about a multi-million pound industry run by the state trying to create a new type of society without any mandate from the electorate then “social enigneering” seems the appropriate term. Spare us from secular messiahs trying to use schools to save our souls.
Elsewhere on the site I suggested that collapsing the fact finding and action phases of the campaign might lead to confusion. That contribution is ‘awaiting moderation’. I am surprised, in the context where you say, again somewhere else on this site, ‘you don’t need to ask permission’ that you need to moderate comments! By all means delete obvious time-wasters.Re leading questions’…
Thanks Martin. We’re not pre-supposing a programme but providing an opportunity for debate. Whilst this may seem frustrating this isn’t your normal activist-with-an-agenda organisation.
Part of providing a platform is getting people to step up if they want change. Without being facetious, if you want the site to change, suggest an alternative!
… I looked this up and it is the old David Hume point about deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ to which your correspondent Old Andrew makes oblique allusion. Please do redesign the site to make it more attractive and easier to navigate. The intentions and dynamic are really interesting. Martin (Teach and Learn with Georgia English-teaching project).