Information Gatekeepers?

      Education's Purpose and Intent


    The common thread in all my daily writings for this week is that as Americans we are not good at coming to consensus about the purpose of our educational systems.  When you look at the history, the power of education is undeniable.  Our system was created to produce thinking voters to support democracy; it was a key to the Civil Rights Movement, and it gets blamed for almost all social problems.  Powerful.  Important. Ambiguous.

   We've read and talked about education's purpose being to guide and prepare people for good citizenship, to create a national workforce, to foster a smaller group of intellectual leaders.  If any or all of these are adopted as the primary purpose, then the age of high stakes testing, standards based system makes sense.  Student are given the information we want them to know and then are tested on retention.  The scary part here is that the educational system becomes the gate-keeper of information and ideas.  Students are encouraged to learn only what we tell them is important, and in today's post-modern society this seems, at best, old-fashioned and manipulative.  This is reinforced by the heavy handed use of standardized tests.  I'm not convinced that ISAT, SAT, ACT are assessing the right thing, not for today's citizens.

   For a few years now, I have noticed that my school's juniors and a seniors are not getting top scores on SATs.  Our middle of the road students do okay, but our top students just do okay as well.  I have spent a lot of time looking into this problem (I'm pretty sure it is a vocabulary issue) but I find myself wondering, maybe it isn't really that big of a problem.  We graduate almost 100% of our students: 75-85 % of those students attend college where most of them find success.  The a large portion of the other kids also find success, being a rural school, our students have the access to career options that don't involve higher ed. 

   

      This leads nicely into other options to the purpose of education like creating thinkers, fostering cultural literacy, and creating a population that can successfully navigate this new Information Age.  I think these are going to be key in the future of education.  In fact, it is exciting to consider what changes would have to be made if we decided that the purpose of education was to create insightful, introspective, independent thinkers who have a solid respect for cultural, political, and religious differences.  If the cookie cutter idea was thrown out, a respect could be given to the importance of individualism.  

    

      Maybe I should not spend so much time on the data I am getting in the form of SAT results.  The people who created the SAT or the ISAT do not know my students.  They do not know the societal pressures and opportunities they have.  Maybe this kind of testing is antiquated, it is too bloated to make changes that reflect our, in flux, society. 

      If I were asked to define the purpose of education it would be something like this.  American 

education should strive to create people with the ability to deal with new information effectively.  These people should have strong awareness of themselves as individuals and how they relate to the people around them; they should have a respect for diversity and innovation, and they should have a skill set rich in higher level thinking.

     Having said all that, I reserve the right to change my mind at any given time in response to new information and ideas.