The Goals of Education
I attended Thomas Aquinas College for my undergraduate studies. There, we read books by many authors recognized as essential to the development of thought in Western civilization, and discussed them using Socratic seminar. We never had lectures, except for occasional ones by guest speakers on Friday nights. I later found that there were certain disadvantages to this way of studying, notably that I had often missed some of the historical context of a work, due to the lack of lecture. However, the great advantages of learning in this way were that we developed the ability to read about and to discuss ‘big ideas,’ and the search after truth became an internalized passion for most of us. I would never trade these advantages for another form of education.
At the beginning of chapter 4 in the textbook, Wentzel and Brophy quote from a work that states: “the goal of education is … the development of personal values for education and self-regulation for learning” (Wentzel and Brophy, 2014, p. 69; quoting Ryan, Connell & Grolnick, 1992, p. 168). I believe this to be, if not exhaustive of the goals of education, central to those goals. Education should develop in students the virtues needed to learn well and spark in students the desire to pursue learning with the courage and perseverance it takes. Content that is not internalized through personal valuation of it is forgotten after the test. Without the development of these strengths in students, education is mostly smoke and mirrors: impressive test scores put up by students who have never become independent learners.
Although I know this, I find it very easy to fall into the trap of simply delivering a body of knowledge to students. The body of knowledge matters – the skills and passion for learning have to be gained in the context of some real subject, and material with stronger ideas and valences to meaning has a better chance of capturing the hearts and minds of students. However, students need to be taught how to engage with this material actively and appropriate it as their own; part of the pathway to this is ‘letting go’ of students’ education to a certain extent. In a seminar discussion, the teacher lets go of a good amount of control so that the discussion can take its own direction and let students discover meanings that the teacher may not have anticipated. It is to be hoped that students will remember what they have read: but what they remember will be colored by the way their own ideas moved forward, and such movements will be unique to each student. I too often hold onto control, testing students primarily on their ability to give back a body of knowledge I have hand onto them, rather than balancing this with assessments that gauge their growth in learning skills and their ability to wrestle with ideas. I think that this reduces the motivation of students in my class.
My goals moving forward, then, will include the following. First, I want to teach students how to read actively and engage in idea sharing and discussion with their classmates. I want to foster the skills of communal learning, which involves engagement with classmates and which also (I believe) involves conversation with minds who are not present except through their written word. I’ll strive for this by reading important texts with students in class, and have them engage with them according to a method of active reading and collaborative learning techniques. Second, I would like to make Socratic seminar a more regular part of my class again, with the whole semester of seminars planned out to correspond well with each segment of my course. I think the freeing discipline of the seminar will help students discover meanings for themselves within topics. And third, I want to articulate to students constantly throughout the year what my primary goals for them are: namely, to learn how to passionately and skillfully engage with ideas in order to become lifelong learners (which means those who continually search after truth wherever it is found). If I say this often enough, and model it by how I learn and engage in discussion, perhaps it will stick.
Wentzel, K. and J. Brophy. Motivating Students to Learn. New York: Routledge, 2012.