The Wider Goals of Education: Beyond the 3 Rs

References

• Research that helps to clarify and realize the wider goals of general education is summarized in John Raven, Education, Values and Society: The Objective of Education and the Nature and Development of Competence ( Oxford , England : Oxford Psychologists Press , 1977 ); Competence in Modern Society: Its Identification, Development, and Release (Oxford, England: Oxford Psychologists Press, 1984); “The Assessment of Competencies,” in New Developments in Educational Assessment, eds. Harry D. Black and W. Bryan Dockrell, (British Journal of Educational Psychology, Monograph Series No. 3,1988), pp. 98–126; “A Model of Competence, Motivation and its Assessment,” in Assessing Academic Achievement: Issues and Problems, eds. Harold Berlak (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1990), pp. 106–299; “The Crisis in Education,” The New Era 68 (No. 2,1987): 38–44; “The Barriers to Achieving the Wider Goals of General Education,” British Educational Research Journal 16 (No. 3, 1990): 273–296. Also, John Raven, Jill Johnstone, and Tim Varley, Opening the Primary Classroom (Edinburgh: The Scottish Council for Research in Education, 1985).
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• E.g., Harry Passow , Harold J. Noah , Max A. Eckstein , and John R. Mallea , An Empirical Study of Twenty-One Educational Systems ( Stockholm : Almqvist and Wiksell , 1976 ); “Munn” Report, The Structure of the Curriculum (Edinburgh: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1977).
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• U.S. Department of Education , The Condition of Education ( Washington , D.C. : National Center for Educational Statistics , 1981 ).
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• Department of Education and Science , National Curriculum: From Policy to Practice ( London : Her Majesty's Stationery Office , 1989 ); National Curriculum Council, Curriculum Guidance, 3: The Whole Curriculum (York: Author, 1990).
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• The Manpower Services Commission (now the Training Agency) in the United Kingdom, in direct conflict with the more recent National Curriculum, in 1984 embarked on a vast “Technical and Vocational Education Initiative.” This has now been extended to “The Higher Education Initiative.” Both aim to foster “initiative, problem solving… creativity… the qualities which make for enterprise … understanding of how society works.” There are numerous similar programs, such as Michigan's “Opening Doors to Employability” in the U.S.
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• Angela Fraley , Schooling and Innovation: The Rhetoric and the Reality ( New York : Tyler Gibson , 1981 ).
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• Lloyd D. Johnston and Jerry G. Bachman , “Educational Institutions,” in Understanding Adolescence , 3rd edition , ed. James F. Adams ( Boston : Allyn and Bacon , 1976 ), pp. 290 – 315 John C. Flanagan, Perspective on Improving Education from a Study of 10,000 30-year-olds (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978); Vivienne De Landsheere, “On Defining Educational Objectives,” Evaluation in Education 1 (No. 2,1977): 73–190 [Oxford: Pergamon Press]; John M. Bill, Caren J. Trew, and John A. Wilson, Early Learning in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Northern Ireland Council for Educational Research, 1974); John MacBeath, Dave Mearns, Bill Thomson, and Sally How, Social Education: The Scottish Approach (Glasgow: Jordanhill College of Education, 1981); Raven, Education, Values and Society.
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• Much of this work is summarized in Raven, Competence in Modern Society; Lyle M. Spencer, Soft Skill Competencies ( Edinburgh : The Scottish Council for Research in Education , 1983 ).
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• Raven , Competence in Modern Society. Particular reference may be made to the work of David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society ( New York : Van Nostrand , 1961 ); McClelland and David G. Winter, Motivating Economic Achievement (New York: Free Press, 1969); Everitt M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 1962). An important, more recent study is that of Rosabeth M. Kanter, The Change Masters: Corporate Entrepreneurs at Work (Hemel Hempstead, England: Unwin Paperbacks, 1985).
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• Raven, Competence in Modern Society; McClelland, The Achieving Society; Morris A. Graham , John Raven , and Philip C. Smith , “ Identification of High Level Competence: Cross-Cultural Analysis between British, American, Asian and Polynesian Labourers ,” Organisation Forum, in press.
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• It is actually truer to say that the economic and social consequences of alternative systems have been studied. See, Gabriel A. Almond and Sydney Verba, The Civic Culture ( Princeton , N.J. : Princeton University Press , 1963 ); Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith, Becoming Modern (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974); John C. Flanagan and Darleen Russ-Eft, An Empirical Study to Aid in Formulating Educational Coals (Palo-Alto, California: American Institutes for Research, 1975). Particular attention may be drawn to the fact that the Japanese miracle is built on social, rather than technological, innovations, their two most important inventions being, first, their information technology-based mechanism for debating the future and gaining consensus on how a desirable future is to be created, and, second, their capacity to analyze and find ways of penetrating every type of political economy known to man.
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• John I. Goodlad , A Place Called School ( New York : McGraw-Hill , 1983 ); John C. Flanagan, Perceptives; Jerry G. Bachman et al, Youth in Transition: Dropping Out (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Institute of Social Research, University of Michigan, 1971); Lloyd D. Johnston, The American High School: Its Social System and Effects (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 1973).
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• Grace S. Wright , Core Curriculum in Public High Schools: An Inquiry into Practices, 1949 ( Washington , D.C. : Federal Security Agency , 1950 ; Office of Education, Bulletin No. 5); Grace S. Wright, Block-Time Classes and the Core Program in the Junior High School (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958; U.S. Department of Education, Bulletin No. 6); Goodlad, A Place Called School; John I. Goodlad, M. Frances Klein, et al, Looking Behind the Classroom Door (Worthington, Ohio: Charles A. Jones, 1974); Centre for Educational Sociology, University of Edinburgh, Collaborative Research Dictionary (Edinburgh: Author, 1977); ORACLE, described in Maurice Galton and Brian Simon, Progress and Performance in the Primary Classroom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Maurice Galton, Brian Simon, and Paul Croll, Inside the Primary Classroom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Brian Simon and John Willcocks, Research and Practice in the Primary Classroom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); De Landsheere, “On Defining Educational Objectives;” Angela Fraley, Schooling and Innovation; Her Majesty's Inspectors (Scotland), Learning and Teaching in Primary 4 and Primary 7 (Edinburgh: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1980).
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• The reasons for their neglect are discussed in John Raven, “Some Barriers to Educational Innovation from Outside the School System,” Teachers College Record 85 ( No. 3 , 1984 ): 431 – 443 “The Crisis in Education,” “The Barriers to Achieving the Wider Goals of General Education;” Raven, Johnstone, and Varley, Opening the Primary Classroom.
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• Her Majesty's Inspectors (Scotland), Learning and Teaching.
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• Neville Bennett , Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress ( London : Open Books , 1976 ).
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• Fraley , Schooling and Innovation.
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• Goodlad Klein , et al, Looking Behind the Classroom Door.
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• Raven Johnstone , and Varley , Opening the Primary Classroom. The project was small scale and a “case study,” “illuminative” [after David Hamilton, Behind the Numbers Game ( London : MacMillan Education , 1977 )], or “educational connoisseurship” [after Elliott W. Eisner, The Art of Educational Evaluation ( London : The Falmer Press , 1985 )] approach was adopted.
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• Basil Bernstein , “Class and Pedagogies: Visible and Invisible,” in Rethinking Educational Research , eds. W. Bryan Dockrell and David Hamilton (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975 ). There is, of course, a deeper version of Bernstein's argument. That is, the objective was to create a mechanism that would select and advance those who were both able to work out what one needed to do to obtain the preferment of one's superiors and willing to do whatever was necessary. This ability, crucially important to both advancement in, and the operation of, modern society, includes the ability to justify one's behavior by mouthing the right words (in this case about useful education). In learning to do these things pupils would be learning to labor in a much more important way than those pupils described by Paul E. Willis , Learning to Labour (Farnborough , England : Saxon House, 1977 ).
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• See, e.g., Wilford M. Aikin , The Story of the Eight Year Study: Adventure in American Education , Vol. 1 ( New York : Harper , 1942 ).
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• Laurence A. Cremin , The Transformation of the School ( New York : Alfred Knopf , 1961 ); Fraley, Schooling and Innovation; Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1974). John Dewey, in The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); How We Think (New York: D.C. Heath, 1910); and Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), seems to have been preoccupied with fostering the skills of the research scientist (the ability to conceptualize, analyze, and experiment) on the one hand and with creating democratic classrooms on the other. His writing does not encourage teachers to make use of multiple talent concepts of ability (for example, by encouraging them to think about a wide range of alternative talents which schools might foster), still less to foster different competencies in different children. Most of William Kilpatrick's writing (e.g., Foundation of Method (New York: Macmillan, 1926; Arno, 1972) is obscure in the extreme, but in his 1918 text on “The Project Method,” Teachers College Record 1918: 319–335, he indicates that, in translating a plan into a reality, pupils should practice proposing, planning, executing, and judging. These are high-level competencies, but Kilpatrick does not analyze them or present them in away that would encourage teachers to reflect on what it means to, e.g., plan and execute, or on the counselling which is necessary if pupils are to practice (and thereby develop) these competencies in the course of undertaking activities they care about. George S. Counts, Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order? (New York: John Day, 1932; Arno, 1969), and Harold Rugg (in a range of texts for pupils) seem to have set out to introduce particular understandings of socio-politico-economic processes. see, Roland S. Barth, Open Education and the American School (New York: Agathon Press, 1972); Aikin, The Story of the Eight Year Study; Charles H. Rathbone “The Implicit Rationale of the Open Education Classroom,” in Open Education (New York: Citation Press, 1971); Harold Rugg in National Society for the Study of Education, The Foundation and Techniques of Curriculum Making (Bloomfield, Illinois: Public School Publishing Co., 1926); Harold Rugg and Ann Schumaker, The Child-Centered School (Yonkers, New York: 1928); Wright, Core Curriculum, and Block-Time Classes. The “bible” of the Progressive Education Movement (National Society for the Study of Education, The Foundation and Techniques of Curriculum Making) nowhere identifies the competencies that are to be fostered, how they are to be fostered, or how they are to be assessed for either formative or summative purposes. Others, such as Will French et al, Behavioural Goals of General Education in High School (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1957); Florence B. Stratemeyer, Hamden L. Forkner, and Margaret C. McKim, Developing a Curriculum for Modern Living (New York: Teachers College Press, 1947); Hollis L. Caswell and Doak S. Campbell, Curriculum Development (New York: American Book Co., 1935); Ralph W. Tyler “Defining and Measuring the Objectives of Progressive Education,” Educational Research Bulletin XV (1936): 67ff; and Education Policies Commission, The Purposes of Education in American Democracy (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1938), do attempt to identify goals, but have muddled together goals at a wide variety of levels. The frameworks are not multiple-talent frameworks, and the goals are only weakly linked to curriculum processes. The majority of “Progressive Educators” have been even less specific about the knowledge they have been trying to inculcate or the qualities which should be fostered in pupils. Indeed most have been explicitly opposed to any attempt to specify objectives. However, this majority is made up of two very different groups of people. One group may be termed the “romanticists.” They believe that children should be left to do their “own thing” and thereby learn “instinctively” what is important to them. A larger group is clearer about what it is opposed to than what it is for. These teachers have been so appalled by either or both (i) the effects on most children, and thence on society, of the competitive and self-advancement centered climate that permeates most classrooms, and (ii) the selection of a small number of pupils who possess a very limited range of not particularly valuable “academic” competencies (which do not in fact deserve to be so described) for advancement into the most prestigious and influential positions in society that they have been more concerned with destroying the competitive climate and the limited “standards” that characterize most classrooms than with putting something else in their place. (It is this group that is responsible for the cult of mediocrity, which is widely associated with Progressive Education.) What is important from the point of view of this footnote is, however, that, for one or other of these reasons, the majority of Progressive Educators believe that any attempt to state objectives would re-introduce competitiveness. Most attempts to implement “Progressive Education” seem to have been an appalling mess; Most accounts of classroom processes focus on encouraging students to take “democratic” decisions within the compulsory attendance framework of schools (a framework that deprives pupils of citizenship rights and most of the sources of power and influence [e.g., the option to withdraw, and the opportunity to influence decisions and gain treatment suited to their own priorities through the marketplace] which are open to people in capitalist “democracies”) and in which teachers could not allow students to implement many decisions that would command majority support from pupils, on “discovering” low-level everyday facts about the local area that have nothing to do with each other, little bearing on any area of organized endeavor, which the pupils are unlikely to need in the future, which the teacher already knows, and which are mostly “discovered” from books, sometimes from highly directed field trips, and sometimes from “discussions” that involve guessing what the teacher has in mind. The recurrent eulogizing references to democracy in this context are not only somewhat nauseating in themselves, they conjure up images of the many crimes against humankind that have been committed in the name of protecting and advancing “democracy,” and in this way may have alienated many potential adherents to competency-oriented education. Among the few partial exceptions to this rather damning picture are the writings of Barnes and her colleagues at the Lincoln School [e.g., Emily A. Barnes and Bess M. Young, Children and Architecture (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, 1932); James S. Tippett et al, Curriculum Making in an Elementary School (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, 1927)], although, even here, Arthur Bestor, ex-pupil of the school, has taken the school to task for offering courses that focused on teaching non-generalizable everyday knowledge instead of encouraging pupils to make contact with academic disciplines (or, we might add, developing high-level competencies) [Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1953)]. Modern students of education are, however, unlikely even to come into contact with the more widely-oriented writing in the areas since it is not referenced, still less embedded, in more recent writings on Progressive Education [e.g., Barth, Open Education and the American School; Ravitch, The Great School Wars; and Torsten Husen and Neville Postlethwaite, eds., International Encyclopaedia of Education, 10 Vols (London: Pergamon, 1985)].
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• None of the teachers Bennett (Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress) asked to define Progressive Education did so in terms of distinctive goals and, as is well known, Bennett subsequently concluded from his classroom observations that most “open” classrooms were a mess. The failure to articulate non-knowledge-of-content goals is well illustrated in Nell Curtis's “Boats” project (see, Tippett et al, Curriculum Making in an Elementary School); Cremin, The Transformation of the School. This would appear to have remained heavily content- and skill-oriented, with a hint of introducing pupils to new interests. It contains little suggestion of using interests to foster competencies. Dewey seems to have been content to evaluate projects designed to encourage experimentation in terms of their contribution to knowledge rather than to terms of the competencies developed in the process. Likewise, he seems to have been content if “democratic” processes were enacted in classrooms. He does not seem to have set down the competencies and understanding required for democratic functioning.
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• The Eight Year Study (See, Aikin, The Story of the Eight Year Study) made a pioneering attempt to tackle some of the assessment issues. However its work was not followed through and the crucial importance of assessment from the point of view of (a) enabling teachers to achieve their goals, (b) enabling students to identify the benefits, and (c) harnessing the sociological forces that determine what happens in schools through the certification process was not recognized .
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• Donald A. Schon , Educating the Reflective Practitioner ( San Francisco : Jossey-Bass , 1987 ).
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• Husen and Postlethwaite , International Encyclopaedia of Education.
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• Robert M.W. Travers , ed., Second Handbook of Research on Teaching ( Chicago : Rand McNally , 1973 ); Merlin C. Wittrock, ed., Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1986).
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• Calvin W. Taylor , All of our Children are Educationally Underprivileged ( Salt Lake City : Dept. of Psychology, University of Utah , 1971 ); Talent Ignition Guide (Salt Lake City: University of Utah and Bellvista Public School, 1976). Fraley, Schooling and Innovation). Consequently, instead of forming (as many would have hoped) the cornerstone of the Husen-Postlethwaite International Encyclopaedia of Education, it is not even mentioned.
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• In the course of presenting in America the work that follows, I have repeatedly been accused of re-inventing the wheel. Although enough has, in reality, already been said to show that this is not the case, the point may be made more forcefully by pursuing the wheel analogy and demonstrating that the relevant wheel has never yet been assembled Up to now, only some of its parts, often distorted or embellished beyond use, have been available. Thus, spokes of varying size and suited to different types of wheel, capable of fostering one or other of the competencies mentioned above in the course of one type of educational activity or another, can be found in Volumes 1 and 5 of the Eight Year Study [Aikin, The Story of the Eight Year Study and Thirty Schools Tell Their Story , New York : Harper 1943 ]. There are a number of rims (general discussions of educational goals and processes) which might have been used to bind appropriate spokes (educational activities which would have fostered different kinds of competence) into a wheel [see, French et al, Behavioural Goals of General Education in High School; Education Policies Commission, The Purposes of Education in American Democracy; Caswell and Campbell, Curriculum Development; Stratemeyer, Forkner, and McKim, Developing a Curriculum for Modem Living] — or usable set of educational programs. However, they have been embroidered in such a way that, if an attempt had been made to use them, they would have impeded the desired movement. Consequently, they, like the spokes, been used as ornaments to embellish teacher-education courses rather than as integral parts of functional educational activities. There is nowhere a hub containing the tools which teachers need to identify and harness individual pupils' motives and values in such a way as to create educational programs that would lead all pupils to practice, and thereby develop, a selection of important competencies, or for them to monitor the development of all these different competencies in different children. The third volume of the Eight Year Study [Eugene R. Smith, Ralph Tyler et al, “Appraising and Recording Student Progress,” in Adventure in American Education, Vol. 3 (New York: Harper, 1942)] contains sketches of a number of cogs (assessment procedures) that might have been developed to couple the curriculum wheel to a power unit, which would move the competency-oriented educational process forward, but the rest of the cogs and the drive shaft are missing. As a result the assessment procedures that were developed were never used to couple the educational activities to a speedometer (formative assessment and feedback process), never mind to couple an assembled wheel to a source of energy or motor. Dewey's How We Think and Democracy and Education; and George S. Counts's Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order? allude in passing to sources of power which might have been harnessed to drive the activity, but they never explicitly discuss the sociological forces that drive the educational system, apparently with a will (like that of the Greek Gods) of their own. They still less describe the pistons or governors that are required to harness and control those sociological forces (in the way Watt worked out how to harness escaping, scalding steam) so that they would drive the whole educational system in the direction in which everyone wants it to go. The point of this footnote is to illustrate that there is nowhere even a sketch of the requisite wheel, let alone of its attachment to an axle and thence to a cart. Naturally there is no hint, never mind a sketch, of an automobile. The result is that, in place of Parker's, Dewey's and Barnes's vision, we now have a vista strewn with the remains of hugely expensive, failed educational reform projects, projects that have left little trace except the bad odor of their corpses and a few patches of fertile ground (see, e.g., Wright, Core Curriculum in Public High Schools and Block-Time Classes; David Whiting, ed., Blowing on a Candle: The Flavour of Change, Newton, Massachusetts: Newton Public Schools, 1972; It is notable that, although educators' preoccupations have, over time, oscillated between the “needs of the child,” “the structure and datedness of the content to be conveyed,” and “the needs of society,” they have never focused squarely on the one issue that would have brought these three competing concerns together. This resolution could have been achieved by focussing on the competencies that are to be fostered in the course of education, the ways in which the competencies to be fostered need to vary among children, the processes to be used to foster the components of competence and to generate the necessary variety, and the ways in which these competencies are to be assessed. The existence of a huge blind spot in this area is also demonstrated both by the absence of any reference to relevant issues in the International Encyclopaedia of Education and by the fact that Bloom and his colleagues found it relatively easy to produce a taxonomy dealing with knowledge-of-content objectives, more difficult to produce a taxonomy of objectives in the psychomotor domain, impossible to produce a taxonomy in the affective domain and never even noted the need for a taxonomy dealing with high-level competencies. (To add insult to injury, the author has repeatedly been referred to the heading “affective” in his quest for work dealing with these issues. )?
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• Mathematics was not fully integrated into this scheme. However the problems which this teacher had in trying to integrate mathematics into her interdisciplinary teaching actually highlight neither deficiencies in the philosophy of interdisciplinary education, nor deficiencies in this teacher's competence, but the need to re-think radically mathematics education itself.
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• Barnes and Young , Children and Architecture.
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• Nell Curtis, as depicted in Lawrence A. Cremin , The Transformation of the School ( New York : Alfred Knopf , 1961 ).
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• Raven , Competence in Modern Society.
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• Ibid.
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• The implications of this discussion for the criteria and process of program evaluation should not be overlooked. The need to index these wider outcomes makes nonsense of the Joint Committee's Standards for the Evaluation of Educational Programmes and Projects. See John Raven , “ Some Limitation of the Standards ,” Evaluation and Program Planning 7 ( 1984 ): 363 – 370
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• David G. Winter , David C. McClelland , and Abigail J. Stewart , A New Case for the Liberal Arts ( San Francisco : Jossey-Bass , 1981 ).
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• Philip W. Jackson , Life in Classrooms ( New York : Holt Rhinehart & Winston , 1968 ).
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• Raven , Education, Values and Society.
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• Raven , Competence in Modern Society ; “ The Assessment of Competencies;” “A Model of Competence, Motivation and its Assessment. ”
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• In clarifying the value of such assessments, one must continuously bear in mind the lack of objectivity inherent in the forms of assessment most commonly used in schools, for these regularly consign pupils to degrading lives by recording that they perform poorly on traditional tests without recording that they do other things well. There is no meaningful sense in which such assessments can be said to be “objective.” What is more, these assessments also lack construct and predictive validity. See, Raven, “The Assessment of Competencies;” “Questionable Assumptions in Test Construction,” Bulletin of the International Test Commission ( Nos. 28 & 29 , 1989 ): 67 - 95 ; “A Model of Competence, Motivation and its Assessment.”
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