Abstract

The tone of this book is set by a quotation from Allport's The Nature of Prejudice: person knows his own culture who knows only his own culture. Let us imagine education to be the pursuit of understanding, a continual striving to examine the base of our present sense. Let us also imagine that schools provide us with the opportunity to engage with new experiences in ways which enrich our lives. That we are enabled to appreciate the skills of the potter, poet, physicist and dancer and preserve a sense of wonder and doubt about the world. If this is what education was about then there would be no need for books on ethnicity and achievement any more than those on gender or special needs or social class and education. That there are many categories of human being who are denied educational opportunity is not just the result of a malfunction in the distribution system, but more importantly a reflection of the poverty of understanding of the nature of education itself. The principles of education are simple to state. One must begin where the child is, accepting the world inhabited as valid. There is no merit in viewing any background as a deficit, a child is the product of home and culture, this is not a deficit but rather the given from whence we start. Clearly there are advantages in some home backgrounds but the advantage of some is not the deficit of others unless, that is, one has a predetermined view of what is the nature of the human condition. As we cannot change what has gone we can only look into a child's background for clues for growth instead of excuses for why a child cannot respond to the educational diet under offer. Another principle of education, not in fashion at the moment, is that the ends of education are unknown. No one is ever 'educated' since we are continually in the process of becoming educated. We can never predict what will excite, what will bore, what will challenge and what will intrigue the individual. In consequence the educational encounter must allow for questions, for alternatives, for provisionality rather than the attainment of a set of predetermined targets. There are illogicalities, non sequiturs, limitations and lacunae in all our thinking whose removal is the task of education. The refinement of thought, the search for wisdom, is a universal feature of the human condition, not the sole preserve of any subset of human beings. These principles of education go further than, but do not contradict, those given by Verma. He sees, in a classic functionist tradition, two major aims of education. One aim is to foster an individual's development in terms of the acquisition of skills and knowledge valued by society. The second is to meet the needs and requirements of a society as a whole if it is to operate effectively. Both are valid but only partially so as 309

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