Education to what end?

I suppose one reason to read the ELCA statement (mentioned in my previous post) is because the issue of to what end we might be educating people is a crucial and highly contested one these days.</p>

Our son Alex goes to Crosswinds Middle School, here in Minnesota, a really quite wonderful public school that is an International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program. Yesterday our local paper published a news article on the IB programs that are springing up all over the place, and noted that several people have criticized them. One critic was quoted as saying "It teaches global citizenship as a priority over American citizenship... too much of IB discards pure knowledge in favor of activities, group projects, discovery learning that people didn't like in the Profile of Learning."

Imagine! Venturing to criticizing US history on the basis of a larger, global history base, not to mention using group projects and collaborative learning! I wonder what such a person (who represents an education advocacy group) thinks learning to be a citizen might be about?

Today I read another disturbing report, courtesy of the journal Inside Higher Education, which notes that due to lobbying pressure a national accreditation board is considering removing "social justice" as one of the possible terms a school might use in evaluating a teacher. Not that such a term has to be used for all teachers (heaven forbid!... can you hear my sarcasm?), but simply that the term perhaps ought not to even exist in the lexicon of possible terms to be used.

Given the pitiful state of most Americans' knowledge of US history, which condition is clearly being used to the advantage of the current administration, it behooves progressives to wake up and take notice of these actions. It's not simply the debate over "intelligent design" that we need to pay attention to, but the more basic and fundamental question of to "what end do we educate?"

On that note, one of the more accessible and pertinent books might be a short little book that Neil Postman (he of blessed memory) wrote a number of years ago, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School.