What is school for?
This seems to be a pretty simple question. School is obviously for educating people. But if you ask a further question – what kind of people school wants their students to be, it will become complicated. After reading the manifesto written by Seth Godin (https://hubpages.com/education/stop-stealing-dreams) and his TEDx video – what is school for (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXpbONjV1Jc), I learnt about the history of modern education and start to think more about this topic: what is school for?
As shown in Godin’s manifesto, the public education started at early 20th century. The aim for creating public school was to train the students to be qualified workers for factories. So the school requires the students to be obedient to the teachers and memorize the knowledge that was taught to him. This is determined by the production efficiency at that time. Obedient and hard-working workers are enough for the economy.
However, today’s economy of US has grown into a giant. Workers who can only do what they are told to do are hard to find jobs with high salary. As the profit of traditional manufacturing goes down, people who are able to create and design products become rich. Therefore, the society is starting to call for the transformation of school from teaching obedient students to teaching creative students. The students should become the center of the learning process. They should know why to learn, how to learn, and how they can make a difference by using what they learn in school.
To educate creative students is not as easy as to educate obedient ones. There are no longer right answers for the questions. The students have to explore and fail again and again to solve a real-world problem. But this is very useful in their future career when they face the complexity situations. Free and independent thinking should be encouraged by the teachers to let the students cognitive conception to the problem. That is why realizing the humanity of individual student is so important in the education today.
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