Discuss the important contributions that the education systems make to the state - Essay Example

1 Discuss The Important Contributions That The Education Systems Make To The This paper will seek to look at the various contributions that education systems make to the state, how these might be for the common good and also discuss any possible negative impacts. ________________________________________________________________________________ Definition of education. According to the Oxford English Reference Dictionary to educate is to give intellectual, moral and social instruction especially as a prolonged process. It goes on to say that it especially means to instruct for a particular purpose. Especially maybe but not entirely. From the moment a child is born it is being educated for better or worse by the world around it and the people in that world. He sees, he listens, he feels and he thinks. Everything about him is capable of being part of his education. This is a definition that Madame Maria Montesorri, the great Italian educator would have agreed with. In 1949 in her book The Absorbant mind, chapter 1 she said:- If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of mans future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individuals total development lags behind? That she also wrote titles such as The Formation of Man and believed in a child centered environment in which the child could learn at his own pace. Some though have a narrower view. They see education only in the narrow sense of formal learning and measure it by literacy levels and examinations. By this definition some of the so called primitive societies of the world are uneducated and so, by this definition, incapable of contributing to wider society and so undeserving of its benefits. In the 1770s when Captain James Cook sailed in Australian waters his home land of England, while not perfect, had many fine buildings, libraries and works of art. Its religion was formalized and, for some at least, higher education was available. The natives of Australia and other countries visited by his ship on the other hand had no fine 2 buildings or books. They hadnt even invented the wheel or the alphabet. Their art works consisted of rock paintings and their was no apparent system of formal education. Yet who was better fitted for the country – the English, with their knowledge of Latin and science, or the aboriginal tribes men who knew which plants were poisonous and which good to eat, who could find their way to water when none was visible and were able to survive in a seemingly hostile landscape. In an earlier time it was the uneducated people of North America who were able to help the first settlers from England to grow crops. Without their help 42 of the original 102 who sailed on the Mayflower had died during the first winter. Yet society has often used a person’s lack of education as a means of control. Until the Education Acts of the19th century it was very easy to argue that the majority should have no say in government because they could not read and write – an argument that was also used by white people in North America against people of African origin. ________________________________________________________________________________ Yet society in the main still measures education by book learning. According to the Guardian, 20th April 2005 half of the British prison population at that time had poor literacy and numeracy levels and had gained no qualifications in school. 40% were said to have a severe literacy problem. This was based on tests done on their reception in prison. So it seems that many of those who contribute in a negative way to our society have not been able to fully benefit from the present education system. A 2002 report by the Social Exclusion Unit stated that most prisoners come from socially excluded groups. They were 13 times more likely than the average to have been in the care of the state and even more likely to have been unemployed. This is in a relatively wealthy country. What of the other end of the scale? Somalia is one of the worlds poorest countries. They rank lowest in the United Nations list of social and economic levels that that use in order to assess human development. Their estimate of literacy levels is about 24%. Compare this with the United States of America, which has a literacy rate above 86% ________________________________________________________________________________ 3 When a child is born in whatever society, from the richest to the poorest, it is totally dependent. Education, in whatever form, leads that child to independence. This includes what he learns at home which will include everything from how to interact and what is and is not acceptable behaviour, to the learning of colours, names and family stories. Later, at school or college and by his interactions in the wider world he will learn about society in general and what is expected of him. In the past education has been used by governments as a form of control. For instance the banning of Welsh in Welsh schools. This no longer goes on, but for many years it meant that children were being cut off from their natural inheritance. It was as late as 1990 before an attempt was made by the Welsh Heritage Schools Initiative began under the auspices of the Institute of Welsh Affairs to enable children to study their Welsh heritage. Earlier in the same century children were being punished for speaking the language of their homes. Similar things happened in other societies throughout history. ________________________________________________________________________________ In chapter 2 of her 1961 work The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie a novel set in an Edinburgh girls school Muriel Spark says To me education is the leading out of what is already there in the pupils mind. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education. I call it intrusion. Many educators would not agree with her. Some seem more concerned with indoctrination than enhancement of a childs natural abiliites. Facts are sometimes taught which are rather theories or unproved hypotheses – the teachingof the superiority of the Aryian race to German young people in Nazi Germany for instance, known as Rassenherrschaft. We do not need reminding of the consequences. ________________________________________________________________________________ Muriel Sparks idea on the other hand, of using a persons natural abiliites can only be a positive one for the person concerned and for the society to which they belong. But, Education costs money according to Sir Claud Moser, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford in the Daily Telegraph of the 4 21st of August, 1990. He went on to say in the same article, but then so does ignorance. Not everyone can benefit form an Oxford education of course, not needs to, but I believe that almost everyone benefits from a degree of education. Consider trainee nurses. They will spend some weeks in a preliminary training school and then comes their first day of the ward. What tasks can they usefully be given? Almost none by themselves. At this stage they are more or less only observers, seeing what their seniors do, taking notes perhaps. Consider these same people some three or four years later. They now have a paper qualification. They have taken and passed examinations both oral and written. And what a difference. Young people now capable of making important and even life saving decisions – and all because of the education they have received. That education was expensive. Not just in monetary terms. It has taken many hours of study. Often unsocial hours have been worked and so sacrifices have been made. But for the individual and for society it has been worth the cost. The benefits far outweigh the cost. The same would be true of many other professions. ________________________________________________________________________________ For this reason society often helps to provide education. In the past this help may only have come from family who paid school fees and the cost of board and lodging to students. Often a country will declare that education is open to all who need it, but the realities of life mean that it is not. For instance in some African countries education is made available, but parents must pay. Sometimes the school is free, but pencils, books etc are not. And there is also the question of work. A child in school is neither earning nor helping at home or in the family business. When schooling becomes compulsory or the school leaving age is raised it has an impact on the individual and society as a whole. The number of possible workers is decreased. Family incomes decrease. It may be that there are long term benefits of a longer education. Graduates for instance usually command, on average, a much higher salary than their peers, but this may be hard to see for a family that is relying on a child bringing home a wage or being available to care for other family members. 5 ________________________________________________________________________________ Let us consider defence. The most successful military forces are those that are organized and well disciplined. They share a common language and common goals. They can follow instructions and communications are easier. The Romans for instance relied on their armies to extend and maintain their empire. They were not all Romans, or even Italians., but were made up of many diverse peoples, but were united by a common language and common ideas. They were well drilled and disciplined. Not perhaps the usual definition of education, but it was one nevertheless that benefited both the individual, who, if he survived, could retire with a pension, many rights and some status in society, and the Empire, which was able to control its population. In modern times the British government will pay towards someones education in return for a promise of service in the military. In the United States of America the Montgomery G.I. Bill provides for both veterans and active service members money for education costs. ________________________________________________________________________________ Presumably then governments think that a good education is of benefit. However, according to Chris Woodhead, former chief inspector of schools in Britain, in his book The Standards of Today published as an e-book by the Adam Smith Institute in London 2002, exams are getting easier and literacy rates are falling. According to him, (page 9), a quarter of pupils leave primary school with such poor literacy that they are incapable of dealing with the secondary school curriculum. Why this is happening is beyond the scope of this assignment, but think of the cost. People will always be needed to do jobs that require little education such as street sweepers, window cleaners and so on. But that is not to say that these people do not need education. In modern society people need to be able to read and write and have a basic numeracy if they are to benefit from that society and to benefit it.. They need to know for instance how to read signposts, follow a map, understand a bank statement, to write a note or a birthday card. Otherwise they become a burden on society. It could be 6 argued that keeping people in school beyond the age at which they personally can benefit is not necessarily a good thing. It is a waste of their time and of resources and may produce frustration and stress in both staff and pupil. ________________________________________________________________________________ More and more people now stay on for further and higher education, but are we raising false expectations? Employers who in the fifties would have been satisfied with quite low paper qualifications, now have very high standards., and so we find young people with a first degree unable to get employment in the field they want or, in some cases, any employment at all. One third of all graduates are said to never obtain employment at a true graduate level. So is all that time and study being wasted? It is well known that success in life is not necessarily linked to success in school. Albert Einstein failed early exams and believed that his wife had the better intellect of the two. Winston Churchill, great leader and winner of the Nobel prize for literature, had a mediocre school life. Shakespeare, another great Englishman attended his local school in Stratford, but as far as we know had no further or higher education. He probably started school at the age of 7 or 8 and left at about 15. He would have studied Latin and little else for 6 days a week. So we see that society has benefited from great intellects, but these were not necessarily the result of great teaching. Perhaps because none of these conformed to the norm. _______________________________________________________________________________ Education is often used as a means of creating conformity. Alexander Pope said in his Moral Essays, Epistle 1 ‘’Tis education forms the common mind.’ If everyone uses their own system of spelling for instance it makes communication more difficult. Educators often seek to get their pupils to reach a common end. Today this often means the passing of exams so that others may judge the standard they have reached. The first record we have of formal school examinations was in 1818 in a letter from Dr Butler, headmaster of Shrewsbury school. External examinations were first held in 1850 and girls first participated in 1851. Not everyone though they were a good idea. In 1870 Miss Beale of Cheltenham Ladies College stated that to enter her young ladies in an examination that would also be taken by boys of a lower class would bring down the tone of her school. ________________________________________________________________________________ Education is also the means of providing a state with educated workers who can further its means – civil servants for instance, diplomats, but also road builders, engineers, scientists and all the rest. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Conclusion It is extremely difficult to measure the exact contribution that education makes to the state. First of all you would have to agree on what constitutes education. Would you include only that which takes place in formal situations? What would you measure and what against? Literacy rates against gross natural product? Would you compare a countries rating according to the United Nations against a country’s education budget? ‘Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.’ – Lord Brougham, January 1828, the House of Commons. Books Cited Browning,P.C.(1982) Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs, the Everyman Edition, Chancellor Press, 1951 Montesorri, Maria, (1949)The Absorbant Mind, ABC-Clio Ltd, 1988 Pearsall,Judy and Trumble, Bill, editors (1996) The Oxford English Reference Dictionary, Oxford University Press Robertson, Patrick, (1994) The New Shell Book of Firsts, Headline, London Social ExclusionUnit, 2002, Reducing Reoffending by Ex-Prisoners Spark, Muriel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, (1962) J.P. Lippencott, Philadelphia Electronic Sources http://adamsmith.org/pdf/the-standards-of-today.pdf retrieved 16th November 2006 http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+so0006) retrieved 16th November 2006 http://www.globelenvision.org/library/3/526/ retrieved 16th November 2006 http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/Database/stats/keystats3.html retrieved 16th November 2006 http://www.whsi.org.uk/ retrieved 16th November 2006 Read More