5 - Recurring problems in education

Summary

“Values that define humans only as well-endowed animals, that emphasize immediate material well-being and gratification, that favour one group at the expense of others, that encourage individualistic hedonistic self-satisfaction over the family, community or society as a whole, and that focus on the short term over the long term, tend to push civilization in very unsustainable directions.”

Arthur Lyon Dahl (2001: n.p.)

Schooling is drudgery for many students. It is learning encased in passive listening, instructor-transmitted facts and predetermined subject matter. Teaching has come to dominate learning. Control has come to overshadow exploration. The causes of these problems are many and diverse and the generally accepted explanation for lack of individualized learning is that it is too difficult to carry out in classes with many students, few trained educators and limited resources.

However, it can be maintained that the problems are linked to the fact that the fundamental processes of wondering, wandering, caring and daring have, to a great extent, become depreciated and that the basic catalysts of learning – curiosity, language, creativity and ethics – have had to succumb to an intensified concentration on practical employment skills and economic progress.

Downplayed drivers

Diverse theories about how humans learn have been, and continue to be, widely debated. New discoveries in the fields of psychology, sociology, neuroscience and systems thinking have provided previously unknown insights into how people gain knowledge and acquire and practise attitudes and skills. Nonetheless, it is an accepted fact that humans possess a spirit of investigation and endeavour that propels them to continually seek to better comprehend both the visible and invisible universe around them and to improve the conditions under which they themselves and others live.

Curiosity, language, creativity and ethics are the fundamental catalysts of learning, be it in the desert sands of the Kalahari or on the top of the Andes mountains. They help learners acquire existing knowledge and gain new insights. The extent to which these catalysts have been utilized or overlooked in education has varied over time due to the touted intentions and the underlying objectives of the different educational systems. As the final chapter in this book asserts, these catalysts appear to have been superseded in recent years by a dominating focus on the acquisition of skills for economic gain.