The list offered by Marion in an earlier posting was insightful, thought
provoking. I add my thoughts into this discussion. My context is India.
The expectations from education appears to be changing. When I use the
word education, I mean education from schools. Mahathma Gandhi in one of
his letters wrote about the need for primary education. He emphasised, the
three R's - reading, writing and arithmetic. The context of his letter
was, the children from villages(which then formed about 85-90% of
population) got all other education to live and survive in their
environment from their parents, grannies, other elders etc. Since, they
themselves, by large did not know the three R's to teach. Thus, the
schools he said had to play this particular role.
Gandhi died before I was born. Today we are parents. I live in a society,
that wants from schools everything - apart from the three R's, computer
literacy, serve food, provide love that they miss at home, moral education
that we don't have at home etc. We don't want the schools to show any TV
as we have enough of it at home etc.
Schools are responding. After all who is the customer, the parent. the
person(s) who pay for their ward.
There are excellent examples of schools in our country which I can't
afford.
I like this thread because it makes me think, what do I want from the
school and who wants it. I need some time to gain courage to find out what
my children want.
Just a thought.( Please note, my description is for my world, its not the
same in some of our rural areas. We have schools without roofs, teachers
and what do you expect ...)
NB: Please note that this posting is in rhetorical style.
Thomas P Benjamin
benjamin@anand.nddb.ernet.in
[Thomas P=B]
--"Thomas P Benjamin" <BENJAMIN@anand.nddb.ernet.in>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>