Soci-Cultural Issues in Education - Essay Example

The paper describes the differences between the 16th century's education and the education that we have nowadays. Formal education has become widely accepted as the only tool for promoting growth, enriching experience and developing attitudes. Unlike education in the 16th century that embraced several aspects of informal education, the current educational process is procedural and prescribed. The current educational processes focus on several concepts that shun human values. This results in the complete confusion among the students and teachers.

The systems of learning ignore the human element of education. The moral results are far from satisfactory. Consequently, several teachers and students require improvement through the provision of incentives and rewards. A need arises to enhance the teaching approaches, create new value systems and incorporate the human factor in the education sector by aiming at developing appropriate personalities. Prior to the civil war, nearly all educational undertakings were designed to create God-fearing attitudes among the citizens.

Education was mainly dominated by religious teachings. The education system for the common citizens was aimed at creating literacy and building good character. However, the nobility had their own system that integrated nature studies, mathematics and architecture studies. The slave population was forbidden from offering literacy skills to their children. Massachusetts was the first state to accept a centralised system of public education. In 1830, efforts to introduce compulsory schooling paid out with the taxes.

The mandatory schooling has realized increased population dynamics in school. This has resulted in the interaction with people of varied cultures and beliefs within the school setups. For this reason, today’s education system faces the challenge of providing adequate teachers and a holistic curriculum that will harmonize the different cultures (Johnson, Musial & Hall et al 36). Philosophy has been widely recognised as the pioneering point for human progress. It is like the compass of life to human kind.

Man has historically employed exploration and experimentation to unravel the mysteries of life and attain perfection. In an attempt of addressing all the knowledge requirements of life, various schools of learning have emerged to equip humanity with skills for coping with today’s complex society. In the previous centuries, education would be described as bi-polar but it has since developed into multi-polar. This has resulted into a myriad of problems affecting the planners of education and the learners.

Today’s society is very multifaceted and the elements of matter, society, community, group or nation have become diverse and complicated (Johnson, Musial & Hall et al 38). For this reason, it has become extremely complex for philosophers to devise an education system that is capable of addressing the challenges presented by the different frontiers of life. The functions of philosophy are to determine the values which education ought to pursue. Bertrand Russell in his theory proposes that education should have an autonomous existence that is effective when it evolves some known process to meet the fundamentals requirements of the society.

The function of education is not only to equip