21st Century Educator

Should the goal of schools be to prepare students for jobs when they complete school? The answer to this question seems to be obviously yes to many people, but this naive answer is problematic for a few reasons.

At the end of the 19th century, many educators agreed, the role of schools was to prepare students for a life of monotony in the factories.

"[Schools are] in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products... manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." Elwood Cubberly, Stanford's Dean of Education, 1905

"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual...

...The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places...It is to master the physical self... to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world." - William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education, 1889 - 1906

John Dewey had a cautionary note for teachers that they should recognize their role in this situation.

"Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth." John Dewey, My Pedagogical Creed, 1897.

Consider now this quote from the current Secretary of Education for the United States.

"We need more highly trained, highly skilled workers; we need to keep raising standards, raising the bar..." - Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education, 2009 - Present

"We still don't have enough engineers." President Obama, June, 2011

When the goals of industry match the traits we think good people should have, then no one notices that our focus is wrong. What if the goals don't match? What if the US economy needed 100,000 more janitors instead? Are the aims of an education focused on the needs of industry the same as an education focused on the needs of our students?

We should be helping develop good people, which our world desperately needs. While it can be argued that a value judgement like "good people" is difficult (impossible?) to define, the key here is not that we carefully define the judgement itself, but that we recognize the change in focus. 

• David Wees's blog

About David

David is a mathematics teacher and a learning specialist for technology at Stratford Hall in Vancouver, BC. He has been teaching since 2002, and has worked in Brooklyn, London, and Bangkok before moving back to Canada. He has his Masters degree in Educational Technology from UBC, and is the co-author of a mathematics textbook. He has been published in ISTE's Leading and Learning, Educational Technology Solutions, The Software Developers Journal, The Bangkok Post and Edutopia. He blogs with the Cooperative Catalyst, and is the Assessment group facilitator for Edutopia. He has also helped organize the first Edcamp in Canada, and TEDxKIDS@BC.