Formal Education - Assignment Example

 Formal Education Introduction "... let us unite, not in spite of our differences, but through them. For differences can never be wiped away, and life would be so much the poorer without them. Let all human races keep their own personalities, and yet come together, not in a uniformity that is dead, but in a unity that is living." Rabindranath Tagore. Schooling is only a small part of induction of culture in the young minds. According to Bruner (1996, pp.ix-x) “ Indeed, schooling may even be at odds with a culture's other ways of inducting the young into the requirements of communal living.... What has become increasingly clear... is that education is not just about conventional school matters like curriculum or standards or testing. What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and otherwise.” Civilization will not grow or even develop unless cross-generational learning is present. The children lean from their parents and other contacts and this forms the basis of education. Inherent learning powers eradicate the need for each human to compute all the secrets of life on their own, and are strained to recreate betterments. By contact to sensory experiences, we naturally obtain social, motor, language, and thinking skills. These are laid in memory cumulatively, and are the references of intellectual and cultural growth. All through history, humans have discerned the rewards of education, and have enforced a plethora of creative schemes for teaching and learning to achieve individual and group goals and of course formal education is one among them (Renee, 1998). But there are many criticisms about formal education. These lines from the poem ‘The School Room on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill” A Poem by Judy Page Heitzman ‘While most of us copied letters out of books, Mrs. Lawrence carved and cleaned her nails.’ The lines from the poem clearly show how children of today hate formal education. The above lines show a hidden fact in the poetry that the teacher is also not all that efficient. She has asked the students to copy the letters from their book instead of dictating herself and she seems to be busy with her beauty. Poem teaching in formal education also possess many problems. For instance the following lines from Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins show how children hate learning poem. ‘But all they want to do Is tie the poem to a chair with rope And torture a confession out of it.’ These lines shows that the readers very often bind the poem to a chair and extract the superficial meaning and copy it out as a mere essay. Art is something to be devoured and enjoyed, not just read and forgotten. It is only in junior classes that we swallow all that is taught by the teacher. As we go on to dissect the poem as a piece of art we have to dive deep in the superficial facts and fancies and bring out the pearls. Relevance of Formal Education Relevance, still, is not only about the nature of subject. In education, the dispute of relevance rests in two areas: 1) Procedure of instruction and learning and 2) The process of ensuring currency of content/information Actually in a complex society, committed educational institutions are a requirement, even though Illich (1970) indicates persuasively that they are not. On the other hand, being taught something properly is never better than second-best. The error is always committed by people who recommend ever more accessions to the standard curriculum, like "citizenship", "managing personal relations”,” parent craft" and the so-called "key skills". Their immature belief that these can be educated and acquired out of linguistic context, at a time and place of the teachers' choosing does not hold good. Lave and Wenger (1991) and more intensely Becker (1972) have proved that to put education into a formal educational context has a number of effects, all of them disconfirming. Hunter (1994) has talked about the affect which the "social technology" of arranging a school has on the preparation of the curriculum. And Holt (1977) in fairly utopian vein has researched these restrictions and their options. An old man's thought of school, An old man gathering youthful memories and blooms that youth itself cannot. Now only do I know you, O fair auroral skies--O morning dew upon the grass! And these I see, these sparkling eyes, These stores of mystic meaning, these young lives, Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships, Soon to sail out over the measureless seas, On the soul's vo An old man's thought of school, An old man gathering youthful memories and blooms that youth itself cannot. The above lines taken from the poem, ‘An Old Man's Thought of School’ by Walt Whitman, in a way supports formal education. According to him a school is not just a building. I t is something that anchors the students to the sea of knowledge. He says that even youth will fail to provide the real good profound memories of the school days. The school is not just the place for studying spellings or improving our vocabulary. It is neither the place where we can see a lot of boys and girls, it is a building where life goes on, a living building where the shrill cries, laughter of students keep echoing, the blackboard and the benches having many stories to tell. Conclusion “Pass/Fail” by Linda Pastan You will never graduate From this dream Of blue books. No matter how You succeed awake, Asleep there is a test Waiting to be failed. The dream beckons With two dull pencils, But you haven’t even Taken the course; When you reach for a book - It closes a door In your face; when you conjugate a verb - it is in the wrong language. The above lines from the poem reveal the concealed theme reflecting the real modern trend of learning. The poetess says that man can never free himself from the dreams of success and failure. Both are like the two sides of a coin. One ceases to exist in the absence of the other. The dream of passing or failing is something from which we can never free ourselves. So, the right approach is to do and leave it to God. The situation of “To be or not to be…..” is to be entertained by all. Dwindling among things and hanging in the balance will not set us the right path. The subject of success and failure is such that even if we try to forget it and sleep, we are sure to dream about verbs, vocabulary, etc., which will boomerang only for the worst. However, the solution to such problem remains concealed. Reference 1. Becker, H. 1972. “School is a Lousy Place to Learn Anything In” American Behavioural Scientist (1972): 85-105, reproduced in R G Burgess (ed.) (1995) Howard Becker on Education Buckingham: OU Press 2. Bruner, J., 1996. “The Culture of Education, Cambridge, Mass.”: Harvard University Press. P. ix -x 3. Holtj, 1977. “Instead of Education: ways to help people to do things better Against Education” Harmondsworth Penguin 4. Hunter, I. 1994. “Rethinking the School: subjectivity, bureaucracy, criticism”. St Leonards, Australia. Allen and Unwin 5. Illich. I. 1970. “De-Schooling Society”. Harmondsworth, Penguin 6. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. 1991. “Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation”. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 7. Newman, Renee M. 1998. “A History of Formal Education.” Henderson, MI Read More