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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

What The Goals Of A Good Education Should Be

Education is the key to success. With a good education a person's future regardless of race or gender is unlimited, but without it there is no way a person can succeed.

With this being an election year our education system is at the forefront of attention and rightfully so, because it is failing in some many areas. I'd like to list what I feel the goals of a good education should be:

1. To learn to understand, appreciate and take care of the natural world we live in. Most people go through life unaware of the fascinating and complex events around them, of climate and terrain and vegetation and animals and people and their interrelatedness. People of all ages need to know not only what the environment is like but how to keep it habitable.

2. To understand, appreciate and learn to live with the people from every country. Every child must learn about the races of the world and rich variety of the world's cultures. Students must learn about the history of humankind and of nations. They must learn that there are many people in the world today who differ from them profoundly in habits, ideas and ways of life, but perceive these differences not as reason for uneasiness or hostility, but as challenges to their capacity for understanding.

3. Every student should have an area of aesthetic experience, which includes religion and spirituality. The significances, the meanings we perceive, are private. Students need to learn how to give themselves some kind of beauty and order so that they can not only enrich their own lives but also contribute more to the lives of others.

4. Everyone must be capable of earning a living. Students need to learn about business and finances. They need to have entrepreneurial skills as well as how to manage and invest their money. These skills can be learned in school or out of school, and at any level, from humble work to highly paid, professional skills. Throughout all of high schools and colleges there needs to be a strong and active relationship between the academic world and the world where people make a living.

5. I have saved for the last that which I regard as the most important of all, namely, the leaning of some kind of critical or intellectual method. Bombarded daily with millions of word by print and electronic media we all have to have some kind of critical method by means of which to decide whom and what to believe, and to what degree. Students must given a chance to see both sides of every issue so that they are able to make an objective decision.

In summary, the five goals of education should be (1) our world, (2) the world's people, (3) an area of aesthetic experience, the search for order, (4) earning a living, and (5) learning a critical or intellectual method, a way of sorting the important and the true from the unimportant and the false.