Science, moral authority and the implications for education

Starting back to a new term and prepping for the classroom myself and read this latest post from Frank Furedi in Spiked

• At a time when society finds it hard to provide compelling answers to the problems that people face, the realm of science is being plundered in search of moral authority.
• Evidence-based education, which is intimately linked to the ‘what works’ culture, leads to a form of processed education. Processed education is dominated by an instrumentalism that threatens to reduce education to a technique and teaching to a technical intervention.
• Not only does the quest for an evidence base distract educators from teaching and from confronting challenges - it also doesn’t work, even in its own terms. 

Two things are inter-related here: the use of science to infer moral, political authority within decision making and the implied corollary that education not embracing the presumptive process is deficient. Furedi issues an important warning against both trends but is particularly worried about the reductionist effect that a reliance upon science (especially normative science and post-normal science) invokes within education. 

Teaching should be the facilitation of discovery and personal understanding of experience, not the imposed accreditation in approved thought, paradigms or ideology.

Life, learning and living

Good post this: what-if-i-dont-have-a-passion
 

Don't expect your calling in life to find you -- you have to go grab the world and be brave enough to venture out and discover for yourself!
 

Or just live the life of quiet desperation your family prescribes for you and confines you to because of their fears. 

You have to live your life as you, not the life anyone wishes for you.
 

And that can take time to discover, define and realize. But it's not a race, it is a journey and enjoying, experiencing the journey is the point of life.  We are all going to die.  Crossing the finishing line first is not the goal.  Giving love, finding love and sharing our love with people, of spaces and places and creating something of value -- that's the purpose.  There is no timeline but our own.

value and edcuation

A thoughtful post from James Delingpole, who writes:

• The most important thing of all for a teacher is – or should be – to be placed in circumstances where you are properly able to teach.

Delingpole sees the problem in contemporary education as stemming from a cheapening of instruction, wherein the free, state-provided education is akin to

• ...one of those all-you-can-eat-buffets, where the food is so cheap you no longer see it as a dining-out treat but as something almost contemptible.

What is needed is for the institutions, the students and the larger society to perceive and re-assert the value that arises from an education.

This presumes, of course, in higher education, that institutions and professors are supplying an education that provides value in contemporary society, for a globalized world, in an era of profound and rapid change. 

It also calls into question the real worth of MOOC's and the pressures to adopt massive, on-line, distance and remote courses distinct from the personal, communal contact of the real classroom.  As Susam Blum writes learners are people, not isolated test-taking brains.

Update:

•  Education is primarily driven by motivation, and online learning doesn’t do anything to address people’s motivational needs. Why on-line education is mostly a fantasy.