The Principal Goals Of Education

Throughout the history of public education, there have been barriers to the equality of opportunity philosophy. Thomas Jefferson’s proposal and Horace Mann’s implementation of public schools excluded non-citizens like blacks, women, and Native Americans. Next, an increase in immigration and industrialization widened cultural and economic differences between students. The greatest obstacle to equal education

I can still remember coming home from school after an exciting day in the first grade. I would go straight to my room, line all of my dolls up in the floor, and “teach” them everything I had learned earlier that day. But of course, not every child who pretends to be a teacher in his or her early years actually becomes a teacher. So although I enjoyed “teaching,” I never really considered it as a choice for my life-long career.

In Kisautaq Lenona Okakok’s essay “Serving the Purpose of Education” she discusses the education dilemma in her borough of North Slope, Alaska, where many of the occupants are indigenous people of the Inupiat. Western education was thrust upon the Inupiat people of Alaska, changing the traditional way they taught their children. Okakok explains why and how The Board of Education for North Slope, Alaska took entire control of their education system after having Western education try to influence their way of teaching. The way the Inupiat teach is different from that of Western education, not only do they teach a different language (Inupiaq), they also need to teach a different curriculum that is better suited for the people of the North Slope compared to that of Western education. Okakok’s essay analyzes the way Western culture and teachings influenced her own culture, and how the Inupiat have taken control of their own education again while using considerable examples to defend her claims.

The goals of public education revolve around three main areas that include; the political goals of schooling, the social goals of schooling, and the economic goals of schooling. These goals were placed with the idea that all children should receive public education whether you were poor or rich and schools focused on teaching about political views and the law to avoid conflicts. Schools were the focus of many hopes for political, social, and economic improvement.

Another of my teaching methods delivered is by way of ‘on the job’ training which allows me to assess their progress, explore their knowledge and skill by observing and questioning their processes. This method of teaching falls in with Kolbs (1984) four stage experiential learning cycle.

From an early age I found learning hard and in my early educational years I

ii. Another important factor I must consider when identifying the needs of my learners is their learning process. A commonly used theory of learning process is that of Kolb (1984) who describes four different stages of the learning process as; Concrete experience, observation and reflection, abstract conceptualisation, and active experimentation. This theory particularly gained insight into the fact that greater understanding is achieved by learners when different and appropriate means are deployed to teach the same concept.

Many may believe that the United States school system is flawless; that no other countries school system or organization is as advanced as ours, “just like our government.” Those people need to come into the realization that our school system is broken, we need to be realists and not dreamers when it comes to something as serious as our education. Our school system has not been putting in the needed or required effort to reach the goals of true education or a good education that we, as students, deserve. Schools have been cheating us of what we deserve. Although some may believe our school system is perfect, it is not; our school system is broken and it needs to be fixed.

The National Education Goals, adopted in 1990, specified eight goals for educational improvement in the United States. As stated in the National Education Goals, “By the year 2000, every school will promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children” (National Education Goals Panel, 1998). According to the final report, there was no significant change in the level of parent participation in the majority of the states. The No Child Left Behind law established strict provisions for states, school districts, and schools with regard to parental involvement among the parents of disadvantaged students for increasing academic achievement (U.S. Department of Education, 2003). Epstein suggests that schools establish comprehensive school-family partnership programs.

David Kolb developed a learning theory that involves concrete concepts which learners process experience. Kolb’s theory is based on intentions that learning takes place through four linear cycles based on experience and the personal changes that occur throughout that experience. As Kolb (1984) states, “learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (p. 38). Similar to other scholarly theories of learning, Kolb has many critics. I will discuss Kolb’s theory and summarize some of the critics to this theory. Also I will use Kolb’s theory and the critic’s comments to improve my approach to teaching.

My desire to become a teacher began while I was in junior high school however; my family, friends, and coaches basically turned me against it. They said it was a jobless market with no future. At that age, those people were very impressionable on my decisions, and because of this I became disillusioned about my career, and at that point I just knew I wanted to attend college.

For learners the objectives of learning and development are to develop new skills leading to growth in their professional or personal life. There are many ways to identify objectives, they can be identified by the learner and discussed at the review process. Or identified by the organisation and again discussed at the review process. For the organisation the objective of learning and development is to make the workforce more efficient, flexible and able to deliver the organisations results in challenging times. Within Standguide the organisation has created what is known as a competency framework which lays down the skills required for the job role, it is used for promotion, development reward and recognition.

Kolb’s experiential learning cycle is a theory that argues that we learn from our experiences of life on a daily basis. Cognitive ability is the way people learn and Kolb believed from an early age we begin to develop a sort of instinctive preference as to the way we process information and use it. Kolb (1984) believes that the process of learning follows a pattern or cycle. Kolb’s cycle is made up of 4 stages; the first stage is concrete experience and Kolb believes that life is full of loads of different experiences that everyone can learn from and whether you are at home, work, school or even out shopping that there was experiences everywhere within those sectors and that it was a way for us to start the learning cycle. The concrete experience is the doing stage, the stage where you have the experience. We then have stage two which is reflective observation, this stage involved looking back at our experiences and reflecting on them. Stage three is the abstract conceptualisation which is

“The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things,” stated by Jean Piaget. Education serves many purposes; it helps a child open their eyes to the world, it provides curiosity and determination for a young adult, and it can provide middle age adults and elders with a spark of belonging and hope. To be able to achieve these purposes, the process of education must start at a young age. Singing the ABC’s to an infant, reading to a toddler, encouraging writing and math skills are a few steps towards all the possibilities a person could have in life.

In the reading Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development by David Kolb (1984), he proposed that learning is a cycle process in which individuals learn through their own experiences in life. This notion of the learning cycle in which he was influenced by the ideas of three other theorists (Piaget, Dewey, and Lewinian) called it Experiential Learning Theory. Kolb’s theory was based on how people learned by imputing information and processing the information. Within this two abilities, there are four steps in which Kolb’s believe the learning process occurs. The first one he calls “concrete experience”, in which one actually does the learning right then and now. The second one is “reflective observation” when the learner thinks about what they did as a reflection of the experience. The next step is the “abstract conceptualization”, where the learner makes a generalization of the experience. The last step is “active experimentation”, where the learner puts to practice his/her understanding and adapts to it. The learner does this by taking all the first three steps of the learning cycle and seeing the results (pg. 30). Learning is a process in which individuals learn through trial and error. This process can then be reused with our prior experience to strengthen the outcome of our first experience. It is shaped as a cycle in the way we process information cognitively. This is how I understood of the reading on Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory.