Analyse the social impact of a UK government initiative on urban learning - Essay Example

Analyze the social impact of a UK government initiative on urban learning Intoduction: Forming asustainable society needs reformation of educational systems. What people believe and think about the world affects what they do as voters, consumers, and resource owners, as government officials, international diplomats, and employees (Roodman 1999). Sustainable urban development must take a wide view of urban issues and effort to solve urban problems by assimilating environmental, social, and economical components. For sustainable urban development, learning is one of the most significant factors. Maser (1997) defines sustainable community development as a community-directed progression of development based on: a) inspirational human values of love, trust, respect, wonder, modesty, and concern; b) active learning, which is a balance between the intelligence and instinct, between the abstract and the concrete, between action and reflection; c) sharing that caused through communication, collaboration, and coordination; d) an ability to understand and work with and within the flow of life as a fluid system, distinguishing, understanding, and excepting the implication of relationships; e) patience in seeking an understanding of an essential issue rather than applying band aid like quick fixes to problematic symptoms; f) deliberately integrating the learning space into the working space into a persistent cycle of theory, experimentation, action, and reflection; and g) a shared societal vision stranded in long-term sustainability, both culturally and environmentally. In recent years, policymakers in the United Kingdom (UK) have commended their school systems to assure that substantially all students obtain the levels of knowledge and skill in core academic subjects required to succeed in further education, work, and citizenship. Students formerly consigned to a low-level curriculum are now to have admittance to demanding content, and teaching must transform to help students gain this new knowledge. The intimidating nature of this commitment becomes obvious as one considers the troubles of urban schools in the country. The goal of getting all students to a rational standard of proficiency runs directly into the facts regarding urban schools. They provide students from all social classes and gradually from very diverse ethnic, national, and language backgrounds. Though policies are formalizing, so that education and training should become a fundamental and basic right, not only for children, but also for adults. The National Commission on Education (1993) emphasized the importance of raising general standards of education and training if the UK is to improve, or even maintain, its economic position in the world economy. The Commission is known as an urgent task tackling weakness caused by deprivation, gender, race, disability and geography that prevent many people realizing their potential at school, in employment and as for personal and social development. Schools must focus on giving students experiences that they can use afterward for the benefit of a more sustainable world. The exchange of experiences of people from diverse backgrounds is very significant. For instance, programs could be commenced for the exchange of pupils from diverse countries, communities, cultures, and social backgrounds so we can learn from each other. Main Body: Basically, one major task of schools must be to give children and adolescents the capability to participate in community development. In school, pupils must discover their own unique talents and learn how they can use these talents for the gain of the local and world community. Schools must aim to educate responsible, free spirited, inquisitive, creative world citizens who care about the enduring health of the country. Pupils must learn how to build trust and security between the members of a society, and they must learn to worth cooperation instead of competition. Roodman (1999) draws our attention to the supporting fact that mindsets can transform quickly in retort Education. Basically humanists’ vision of a more sustainable future means that (Kurtz 1999): Nearly in twentieth century, Britain was a very influential trading position in spite of having lost its place as the worlds leading industrial nations. Textiles, clothing, iron, steel and coal were exported in large quantities. These industries relied greatly on Third World markets and the existence of the British Empire. Throughout the years of world economic depression between 1918 and 1939, demand declined and traditional export industries declined stridently. There was, however, some diversification into new areas such as chemicals, vehicles and electrical engineering. After the Second World War, a long period of a world economic growth adage the economy recovers. Though this expansion veiled continuing weaknesses. With the recurrence of global recession in the mid seventies, British industries fared defectively in competition with other countries. There is growing recognition in Britain that tackling these problems will require giving a higher priority to knowledge and skills. The recent report of the National Commission on Education (1993) comments: In an era of worldwide competition and low-cost global communications, no country like ours will be able to maintain its standard of living, let alone improve it, by cheap labor and low-tech products and services. There will be too many millions of workers and too many employers in too many countries who will be able and willing to do that kind of work fully and we or people in any other developed country could do it-and at a fraction of the cost. There are several examples today of insurance companies that have their clerical back-up work done in countries where education is adequate and labor is cheap. Computer software is already often written in countries far distant form where it is to be used. These are pointers to the future. (National Commission on Education, 1993:33) To have been learning possible in the urban areas, it should be getting good teachers for children and youth in poverty, not serving education professors endure in academies. Government is attempting to get teacher education a procedure with abiding social significance. Building and retaining large colleges of education for the conduct of activities supposed significant to administrators and faculty with almost no importance of preparing teachers for the real world cannot be vindicated as responsible social policy. Rational people begin with the requirements of our children/youth for more and better teachers. The logic is quite simple. Successful teachers discern best what teachers do. Successful teachers who have instructed beginners are the best people to educate others. Successful teachers who are still working in classrooms are the most suitable teacher educators since they are capable to themselves demonstrate best practices. These are not complex ideas to understand. All constituencies eagerly agree to them, apart from for those who personally promote and profit from sustaining the fiction that teachers are prepared in universities by full-time college faculty with advanced training in research. Thus, University Faculties in schools of education is almost totally experience free of having effectively taught such children/youth. The widening of an access route into training and higher education is an optimistic development. Education and training are necessary to the future of the UK, but, as Miliband writes, there are particular skills needed: All the evidence suggests that for Britain to maintain its current position in the second division of industrialized countries, we need a substantial increase both in our staying-on rates at sixteen, and in our output of educated people from higher education institutions. Today, it is the skills of abstraction, thinking in systems, and experimentation (as well as the thoroughly contemporary concept of working in teams) that [are] the central props to competitive advantage in a modern economy. (Miliband, 1992:7) It is on the whole, significant that all qualifications let students attain a core set of transferable skills and a clasp of a particular body of knowledge. These skills can be defined as: I. Communication skills II. Numeracy III. Personnel and interpersonal skills IV. General information technology skills V. Problem solving skills VI. These skills reflect the contemporary needs of both industry and the public sector. Essentially, these are: VII. Adaptability to change VIII. Taking a creative approach to tasks IX. Employees taking responsibility for their own work and development (Tim Blackman, 1995). The UKs educational provision for sixteen to nineteen-year-olds and the prerequisite of training for young people overall has not been acceptable. Until the establishment of training and enterprise councils (TECs), government training initiatives were mainly focused on relief programmes for unemployed people such as Employment Training (ET) and Youth Training. One effect of this has been to segregate and diminish training, which they have extensively seen for keeping unemployment figures down. For instance, a survey of attitudes between British and German young people found that British young people saw training schemes as a poor substitute to a job and placed a low value on professional qualifications. They also abandoned training for people already in employment until TECs opened this up by providing training credits to help pay for courses for appropriate applicants. Nevertheless, there are several sources of knowledge accessible to teachers. They diverge generally in their usefulness and therefore the extent to which practicing teachers starts them. First is theory that usually learning theory of how people learn and developmental theories of how they grow. There are also theories that under a bind why we have schools at all and what they are planned to accomplish. In no cases do public schools take up a single theory and systematize a school around it. If they did, teacher education would be comparatively simple since future teachers would be capable to carry out that one theory. Montessori came closest to a unified theory but then state mandates regarding required subjects, with physical education, showed the perverseness of expecting that public education in our diverse society could be based on any single theory of development, learning, or instruction. The next source of school behavior is research. Through the exemption of findings from tests and measurement that is how to administer, normalize, and construe tests and behavior adaptation that have turns out to be standard practice in teaching individuals with disabling conditions, research findings have not been extensively or generally executed in public schools. Indeed, a good case might be made that public schools work as institution based on customs and laws that research has usually opposed. What research tells us concerning grouping and tracking is normally opposite to practice. Also, this occurs with the principles of preschool education, preservation, corporal punishment, class size, and supportive learning. Generally, research findings disprove school practices not supported by them. In the majority cases, however, this neglect of "facts" as a basis of school practice is well advised since much that they integrate in the research literature is never simulated, is particularly narrow in its questions, uses consistent tests as the measure of learning, and, worst of all, is based on superficial treatments that might entail children for as little as a few hours in an attempt to authenticate a new treatment. For better and worse, school practices do not imitate educational research and if they did, it would be improbable that the school that tried to function on such science would ever be understandable by its administrators, or livable by its teachers and children, let alone sustained by the public. The next source of knowledge obtainable to teachers is common sense and myths. This area still holds immense sway over daily practices in the majority schools. Everything from the school calendar to what comprised excused absences shows a school culture in which approximately all who have attended schools are expert. These customs are so influential that they prevail over present forms of teacher education. That is, if we were to freeze teacher actions at a hundred points in any given school day, the rationale the teacher would proffer for why se or he engaged in a particular action would not be his or her teacher training. It would be a thoughtless imitation of his/her owns school experiences, or what the teacher discerns to be proper action in the particular school. Commonsensical and tradition can be helpful in that we can act in jointly supportive ways without having to persistently ask ourselves "why." It can also be particularly dangerous as we never question our postulations. As Common sense is dangerous as it supports negative and positive practices with equal vigor. The next source of teacher knowledge is expert opinion. There are the different experts with diverse systems of classroom discipline. In other cases we have expert supports for systems of instruction: mastery learning, supportive learning, or the whole-language approach. The most distinguished example was Madelon Hunters direct instruction model which officially adopted as the way for teachers to teach. As in all systems of pedagogy, if the teachers who execute the method believe in it and assume it enthusiastically and passionately, the method works. While, teachers who do not believe in the method or who execute it technically but not passionately will have students who do not reveal the stated benefits of the instruction. There is no system of instruction that is teacher proof or, on the other hand, so weak that believing, dedicated teachers cannot use it effectively in some schools. However, some techniques are not better than others, but to point to the requirement for methods that they attune with teachers experience if there is to be genuine accomplishment. Finally, the source of teacher knowledge is empirical: the cumulated experience of the individual teacher and the experiences of others. This is craft knowledge. It is the most prevailing source of what teachers do and it must be. The restraints on public schools, and they are terrifying, with state mandates, local directorial policies, finances, buildings, class size, curricular demands, parental prospect, community culture, and school administration, all of which generate working conditions that normally prevent rather than ease good teaching and learning. What effectual teachers use every hour of every day is an unrelenting form of problem solving based on a core of ethical commitments. They consider their children/youth can learn and they believe schooling is the main hope for persuading their life chances. This makes their everyday work as teachers a moral craft established on ethical commitments. Conclusion: Thus, in the middle of our multiplicity and the plurality of our traditions, we require distinguishing that we are all part of an extended human family, sharing a common planetary habitat. The very accomplishment of our species now intimidates the future of human existence. We alone are responsible for our combined destiny. Solving our problems will need the cooperation and understanding of all members of the world community. It is within the power of each human being to make a difference. The planetary community is our own, and each of us can help makes it flourishes. The future is open. The choices are for us to make. Together we can understand the noblest ends and ideals of humankind (Rudd et al 2002). According to National Commission on Education, “Educational achievement should be a major goal of urban policy. The means to achieve this goal includes introducing more effective teaching and learning methods, and providing more resources in areas where clear gains have been shown, such as nursery education and reducing primary school class sizes. In addition, they need measures to reduce the barriers to achievement caused by inequalities arising from income, gender, ethnic group, area of residence and the effectiveness of the school or college. Considerable evidence is now available showing the marked effects of both teaching methods and resources on achievement, and effects caused by factors such as deprivation and variation between schools and colleges in the quality of their leadership, expectations of pupils and parental involvement. Much is already known about how to optimize achievement and reduce the effects of these arbitrary factors” (National Commission on Education, 1993). Education policy must support a positive attitude toward learning in young people, with primary schooling in particular having a vital role in giving all children assurance in their capability to learn and succeed whatever their particular potentials. However, education policy should not lose sight of the significance of equipping people with the language, reasoning and number skills required to absorb new information and acclimatize to change. It is unlikely that a school, for example, will be effective in delivering wider benefits to pupils if it is failing in the central objective of pupils finding skills and knowledge. References Kurtz, P. 1999. Humanist manifesto 2000: A call for a new planetary humanism. Free Inquiry 19, 4: 4–19. Maser, C. 1997. Sustainable Community Development. Principles and Concepts. Delray Bay: St. Lucie Press. Miliband, D. (1992) Introduction: expansion and reform, in D. Finegold, E. Keep, D. Miliband, D. Robertson, K. Sisson and J. Ziman, Higher Education: Expansion and Reform, London: Institute for Public Policy Research. National Commission on Education. (1993). Learning to succeed. A radical look at education today and a strategy for the future. London: Heinemann. Roodman, D. M. 1999. Building a sustainable society. In L. Brown, C. Flavin and H. F. French, eds., State of the World 1999. A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Rudd et al (2002) High Performing Specialist Schools: What Makes the Difference?, NFER, Berkshire. Tim Blackman; Urban Policy in Practice, Routledge, 1995 Read More