Harvy - What is education really about?

"...a line of small dark letters on the overhead projector that emerged as the question, "What is the purpose of education?""  When I first saw this quote in the article, it really hit me.  What is the purpose of education?  We as students have spent so much time critisizing and analyzing political issues in education and reading articles that our teachers have picked out for us.  Articles that are supposed to push us into a deeper level of understanding of education.  Does it work?  Often times I find myself getting half way through an article before I just can't take it anymore and wander off to play games like World of Warcraft or cracking open a book that has nothing to do with our reality, earth, or our universe even.  I find myself entrenched in dragons and wizzards fighting evil, never putting another though into what that article is supposed to mold me into - a great teacher.

This article caught my attention.  It's about how to use nonfiction to peak our students' curiosities, but to me, it was a whole lot more than that.  I could blow this post out of the water in word count, but i'll try to keep it to the point.

To me, the overall meaning that I focused on this time can be best expressed by the line in the article that said, "...practice guiding principles that lead our students to deeper understanding and learning."

I like the idea of using a t-chart that has my focused goal on it.  "How this helps my students understand," is something we all keep in the back of our minds, but so often it's clouded by thoughs like "I have to get my lesson plan done," or, "evaluation is this week, I need to think of a reward to give my students so they'll be good for my evaluator."  There's a very important point to those thoughts, but equally and more important is using instruction effectively and making it student centered versus teacher centered.  I admit to falling into that trap and after reading this article, I am making the effort to become even more student centered than before.  Our students need to be able to use the knowledge we give them, not just know things.

"Questions are at the heart of teaching and learning"
Schools - the administration and the culture they create, the teachers and students -  need to start focusing on the questions, not the answers.  The article was completely right when it claimed that students' questions disappear by middle school.  In a world where academics are publishing new thought and breakthrough theories in the twilight of their lives, i wonder how long it took them to come back to the world of questions.  What happened to the theorists who created those questions in the prime of their lives?  the Newtons, the Leibnitzs, the Einsteins?

I left this article with more questions than I came with, which, in my mind, is an amazing thing even though those questions are not even related to the article.  I'm excited now to go spend what little free time I have this week seeking those answers instead of escaping to a world of fantasy.