Webinar sponsored by Nipissing University to explore your views on the purpose(s) of education, November 4, 2010

1. What Is The Purpose
of Education?
Webinar,
November 4, 2010
Kirsten Olson, presenter

2. Welcome!

3. Carlo

4. Kirsten

5. Who Are We?
(Please complete poll)

6. Purpose:
To understand our own
values and ideas better

7. Ground Rules
• Recognize the expertise of others
• Listen deeply, with a sense of non-
defensiveness
• “When the going get’s tough, turn to
wonder”
• Believe that it’s possible to emerge
refreshed from this conversation

8. My Background
• Been teaching about this for years
• About deepest values, purpose of life itself
• People have difficulty “naming” educational
purpose
• Often assume greater agreement than
there is
• Discourse very quickly goes to judgment,
moral positioning

9. What we believe is
intimately related to...
• Own educational experiences
• Emerges out of our own unique “surround”
• Social class, racial identity, gender directly
influence “purpose” ideas
• “All education is political” (Paulo Freire)
• Becoming more aware of ourselves helps
us hear others better

10. Questions?
Comments?

11. Philosophical Roots
• Plato
• Rousseau
• Dewey
• Freire
• bell hooks

12. Contemporary
Taxonomy
• Functionalist (secure economic foundation
of citizens and country)
• Conserving (cultivate systems of belief,
make connections to a shared, valued past)
• Reproductive (reproduce power and
privilege, often under the guise of
meritocracy)
• Democratic (sustain shared values of
justice, equality, freedom)

13. Where DoYou Fit?

14. To Learn Particular Skills And Competitive
Attributes As a Matter of Equity:
“I want my three teenage sons to be able to ace the SATs.”
-Ronald Ferguson, author of “An Unfinished Journey: The Legacy of
Brown and the Narrowing Of the Achievement Gap” Phi Delta Kappan,
May 2004. Quote from an Achievement Gap Initiative meeting June,
2005.
-Purpose of school is to provide skills and promote achievement that so
that students can be successful in a highly competitive society
-Attainment is in itself social justice
-KIPP Schools
-Harlem Children’s Zone Schools

15. Stabilize, conserve, and reproduce
particular knowledge and values
“Schooling, by definition, must be conservative. It
is naturally dependent on an older generation’s level of
knowledge and sense of values.”
-Leon Botstein, Jefferson’s Children: Education and the
Promise of American Culture, 1999
-E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Schools
-By knowing our past we are better able to grasp our present and future
-Students must have important things to think about to think well

16. From the St. Paul’s School (Concord, New Hampshire)
Humanities Program:
“The study of humanities forms the core of the School’s approach to the liberal arts. The integration of English,
literature, history, and religious studies affords opportunities for students to learn the arts of reading, writing, and
critical thinking. Also incorporating aspects of philosophy and the arts, the humanities curriculum invites students into
an interplay of imagination and intellect. Students learn to cross over the boundaries between traditional disciplines by
viewing the wholeness of human experience.”
Humanities III
Full Year
“Humanities III follows central ideas in the Western tradition through literature, religion, and history.
Chronologically, the course begins with the Greeks and ends with medieval Europe. Students read poetry, drama,
and prose from both literary and historical perspectives, and they learn to recognize universal themes while making
connections between ancient and modern texts, or between texts and film, visual art, or music.”

17. 17
Critique of both Functionalist and
Conserving views
What we are taught to “think about” almost
always privileges those already in power
Education explicitly reproduces inequalities
of class, race and gender
17

18. •Education is a means of providing students with knowledge
and theory to “learn their way out” of their current situation
and to transform their own lives and the lives of others.
•Conscientization: education must develop consciousness for
transformation
•Critical pedagogy helps students see connections to power
and privilege embedded in educational experiences
Transform individuals and
society for greater social justice

19. Strengthen Democratic Ideals and
Morals
“Education must…train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking, but with moral purpose. The
late Eugene Talmadge, in my opinion, possessed one of the better minds of Georgia, or even
America. Moreover, he wore the Phi Beta Kappa key. By all measuring rods, Mr. Talmadge could
think critically and intensively; yet he contends that I am an inferior being. Are those the types of
men we call educated?”
-Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Purpose of Education,” 1948, Morehouse College
-Opportunities for “voice” by all community members
-Flatten typical hierarchical power relations in school
-Powerful learning experiences are co-created and designed in relation to student’s experiences
-School Within A School, Brookline High School, Brookline MA
-Jefferson County Open School, Lakewood, CO
-Purple Thistle Center, Vancouver, BC

20. Learn To Question
“A good education teaches you how to ask a question.
It’s knowing what you don’t know; the skills of critical
thought.”
-Ted Sizer, founder of the Coalition of Essential
Schools, 2001
-Coalition of Essential Schools

21. 21
Teaching meaning-making,
broaden our sights
 "What you want to do as a teacher is to make people aware of the complexity
of experience, of the complexity of the world--that our little corner is real and
very important, but it's not the whole. And we should make the effort to
understand as much of the rest as we can possibly manage. This is not a
threatening position: it is an enriching one. If we can do it, we will be richer,
we will be better. This is what education should aim to do: to draw out from
us what is there so that it can interact with what's outside."
 -Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart
21

22. A fundamental
paradox?

23. Both liberatory
and
democratizing
and
reproducing
social and
economic
inequality.

24. “I can remember my first
experience with tracking. It
was in second grade math.
All the working class and
minority kids had been put
together. I thought we were
all dumb. Like me.”

25. Schooling is colonizing:
“The children before me found it natural and automatic
to accept as normal the schools’ structural inadequacies
and to incorporate them, as it were, right into themselves…
It was a triumph of pedagogic brainwashing…
The result was that too many children became believers
in their own responsibility for being ruined and
they themselves, like the teachers, began somehow to
believe that some human material is just biologically
better and some of it worse.”
-Jonathan Kozol, Death At An Early Age, 1967, pp. 59-60

26. 26
Symbolically redefine us...
“Schools symbolically redefine people and
make them eligible for membership in
societal categories to which specific sets
of rights are assigned.” (Kamens, 1977)
26

27. Provides tools for liberation...
“The educational movement, guided by
passion and principle, [can] help students
develop consciousness of freedom,
recognize authoritarian tendencies, and
connect knowledge to power and the
ability to take constructive action.”
–Henry Giroux, 2010

28. What’s (Actually) In
The Discourse Now?
• Functionalist discourse has become pre-
eminent since 1983
• Tremendously flattened sense of purpose

29. “Purpose” in contemporary discourse...
“What’s the ultimate goal here? It’s not to nourish
curiosity, help kids to fall in love with reading,
encourage critical questioning, or support a
democratic society. Rather, the mantra is
‘competitiveness in a global economy’ -- that is,
aiding American corporations and triumphing over
people who live in other countries.
The biggest fans of standardizing education are
those who look at our children and see only future
employees. Anyone who finds that vision disturbing
should resist a proposal for national standards that
embodies it.”
-Alfie Kohn, 2010

30. Questions for you
• Where do you fit?
• Is your point of view being represented?

31. Text
Which # Best DescribesYou?

32. Discussion

33. Is your point of view
being represented?
(Complete the poll)

34. How was this for you?

35. “[My view] is that the goal for public schools should
be real and meaningful gains, across a wide range
of desirable student outcomes, with greater equity
in those outcomes, in a way that builds and
supports positive morale among all those involved
in schools and also supports high levels of public
confidence in public education.”
-Ben Levin, former Deputy Minister of Ontario
Education, and author of How To Change 5000
Schools