Education is the fastest means to set minds free from the bondage of ignorance and the mundane, and the purpose of education should be to give students the tools needed in order to become self-actualized.
Some may argue that children are born with innate skills that help them succeed or fail at school; but, in essence, no child should fail if the emphasis of education is re-examined and the priorities are re-evaluated.
As it stand now, most schools in the United States, because of No Child Left Behind and other factors, value content over substance, knowledge over reason, and assessment over potential. The emphasis of education is more on helping students learn random facts from the core subjects than it is on creating intelligent self-actualized citizens willing to contribute themselves to the well being of their country and their families.
Re-Examining the Role of Education
The purpose of learning and education should be to help the individual grasp and create a self-identity as he or she learns integral facts about the universe and his or her role in it. Ideas like morals, socialization, self-concept, personal goals, and career aspirations should all be integrated into the curriculum.
Studies on human learning have even confirmed the affirmation that the central theme of learning and teaching should be the self, because they have found that most humans learn through semantics or by relating current information to their previous experiences. This suggests that information about the self and prior experiences of the self are more easily learned. Thus, it supports the theory that the self should be the primal focus of the curriculum, if the focus of the curriculum is on student learning. The main goal of education should be to facilitate the development of the self by providing instruction about life’s circumstances and the decision making skills needed to develop principles, ideals, different perspectives, beliefs and values.
Curriculum Based on Self-Actualization
Education should center on the humanities, (history, literature, grammar, the arts, Civics, philosophy, etc.) multicultural perspectives, the sciences, character education and decision-making skills. The aforementioned topics like humanities and history help one better understand the prior perspectives of others and how others developed a sense of self. With that knowledge, and a constructive curriculum which stresses decision-making skills over content, students can begin to form ideas about what they want out of life.
In general, courses that attempt to teach character education, philosophy, and decision-making skills are crucial to the development of the self because they allow the individual to not only reason, but to form associations with what they learn and how to use it.
After all, what is most important is not what is learned, but how it is used in reference to the self and the world. Thus, the emphasis of education should never simply be to have students obtain knowledge (for knowledge is just information that one has simply obtained through a medium), but it should be to have students analyze, evaluate, use, and build upon what they have learned.
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