Educational missing link a problem
Educational missing link a problem
By Ignas Kleden
JAKARTA (JP): Education should mean both schooling and learning in the broader sense. This has to be so because we cannot separate the matter-of-fact implementation of the school system from its normative ideals.
Schooling refers to instruction which aims to transfer knowledge and skills to create an ability to provide added value to goods and services. In this sense, schooling is almost identical with training.
Learning is personality-building; the transfer of norms and values, through which added value is given to the students themselves.
The normative content of education cannot be ruled out if we want to understand the school system. The ancient Greeks' schole of more than two millennia ago was a learning forum undertaken in their leisure time. It was done outside everyday-life activities, which were related to production for living and reproduction of society. Schools were set up in order that people could dissociate themselves from pragmatic tasks and concentrate on learning which targeted the development of personalities, wisdom and human virtues.
Learning is aimed to provide people with values and norms, knowledge and wisdom, in order that they are able to render their life meaningful. Of course the advent of industry has changed the school system. People start to talk about formal and non-formal education, in a sense which totally reverses the original idea of the Greek schole. Formal education entails providing its participants with both civilized standards and the ability to engage in industrial production. But this has progressed to the extent that critical observers tend to call current school systems all over the world "factory-style schools".
According to Alvin Toffler, who coined the term, schools of this sort aim to produce three basic qualities in the participants, namely punctuality, obedience and the willingness to do repetitive work. Punctuality is needed because industry operates according to a strict time-table. Obedience is required because within industry workers are expected to perform what is decided for them, and not to discuss or to question it. The willingness to do repetitive work is very important because in industry one has to do the same work for a very long time.
These qualities are imbued within formal education through homework tests, and examinations. The empirical separation of training from education, which has occurred in most schools throughout the world, has led radical thinkers such as Ivan Illich to launch his controversial campaign on deschooling. In order for one to be able to live the original idea of schooling, Illich argues, one has to unlearn what one has learned so far within the formal education system and dissociate oneself from the hidden agenda of the formal school system.
Though deschooling is a dramatic critique of the general concept of industry-oriented education, we must not be scared by its apocalyptic undertone. The message is still the same, namely that it is impossible to separate schooling and training from its educational purposes.
Needless to say, we have to find out methods and didactical techniques to bring the formal schools back to their original educational raison d'etre. Central to this is the importance of teaching an ability to think. One of the basic ways to differentiate trained people from the untrained is that the former can think and take action independently.
This is made possible by means of splitting the thinking process into logical steps, each of which can be checked and scrutinized through logical examination. In that sense instructions within formal schools always have a double purpose and a double effect. On the one hand they aim to provide learning materials in a methodical way which facilitate both the reception and the understanding of the material. On the other hand however, through the methodical learning of those materials, the students are trained to improve their ability to think logically.
The success of intellectual education can be measured by examining how the two abilities are provided to the students. This is clear enough, since independent creativity without material knowledge will produce a student who can think correctly while knowing anything. Conversely, material capacity without formal thinking will only produce a student who, like a book, possesses in him/herself a large amount of knowledge while being unable to think logically. The question is then: how can we combine the two intellectual approaches of the learning process and how can we help students produce the two capacities by themselves? One answer is that we have to give more attention to the techniques of instruction, to the didactical methods and to the creation of a productive and critical atmosphere during the learning hours in schools.
However, one should not forget that learning as such is not only a pedagogical but also a social product. This implies, the atmosphere within the learning conditions can only be fruitful if they are supported by the macro sociopolitical conditions outside schools. There is no use in training students to think logically, to speak systematically, to argue clearly and to examine everything critically, if all those capacities are not sufficiently esteemed in sociopolitical life. If one notices that to keep quiet is more rewarding than to speak one's opinions, one will very soon become inclined to shut up rather than put forward one's opinion. At this juncture, whether we like it or not, we will be faced with the fact that the ability to think logically can develop if one gets used to thinking in that way.
The habit of thinking logically will come if there is enough opportunity to train logical thinking. In a sense, the habit of thinking logically depends not only on natural ability but also on the courage to do so. The courage to think logically will come about if there are enough opportunities to do so. However the opportunity and the courage to think logically and to persist in it depend very much on sociopolitical conditions. That is why one basic criterion to measure the seriousness of educational undertaking is to see how logical thinking and the critical attitude are allowed and encouraged or inhibited and discouraged.
But talking about logic without bothering with the corresponding political conditions which support it will result in perpetuating the missing link between education and real life, for the former is very much expected to be a preparation for the latter.
The writer is a sociologist now working with the SPES Foundation Research Center.