Between the values of teaching and learning

In my opinion, any serious discussion of the problems of education, if it goes to its natural extent and extends to its logical dimensions, must eventually lead to a discussion of our way of life in its most general form, and it must move from the narrow perspective of educational problems in particular to the broader perspective. To our social problems in the current stage of our history.

The issue that I would like to defend in this article is that every major problem in the field of education ultimately reverts to a problem that belongs to the core of the life of society, and that education in this sense is nothing but the mental face of society with all its good and evil, progress or backwardness. And that our diagnosis of the state of education is in fact a diagnosis of the state of our society, which is reflected in the mirror of this sensitive facility.

It is not difficult for one to provide evidence and evidence to prove the correctness of this case. Rather, the difficulty may lie in choosing the clearest examples among the huge number of problems that all prove the link between the conditions of education and the conditions of society. In any case, a few indicative examples are sufficient to It proves that our present attention to the shortcomings of education should lead to a broader awareness of the social origins from which these shortcomings have been generated, and therefore our discussions of education should bring together, in addition to the technical aspects of the educational process, a broader discussion of the status of education in the general social context. In a word, the question is: How do we reform education? It will not be answered adequately except in the light of the question: What purpose do we set for our lives? And what kind of society do we want to become in the future?

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Educational Structure

Building the educational structure is based on a broad base, which is primary education, and ends with a narrow top, which is university education. The problem is the intense crowding and violent competition to enroll in the university, and it is impossible to understand both of these problems unless we return them to their origins in the prevailing values ​​in society.

The phenomenon of parents’ lack of interest in the education of their children reflects the desire for direct benefit from the children as a source of income or production in the family, and this desire may have been nothing but a naive expression of a similar phenomenon that is validated in society as a whole, and I mean the lack of sufficient recognition of education as the best type of investment. Or, to say more precisely, the rural man who does not believe in what the school can do in forming the future of his children and his family is a microcosm of the society that does not give education its adequate right as it is an investment for the future, and prefers other types of investment (and sometimes consumption) over it. direct.

Society Phenomena

As for the phenomenon of crowding out over university education, it is usually described as a reflection of values ​​that despise manual work or professions of a purely practical nature, and express social aspirations that are satisfied by the stability achieved by jobs granted to university graduates, as well as the high moral level that a university title confers on its owner.

It was the society itself that encouraged the rule of these values ​​to a large extent, when it provided the university with opportunities to advance that it did not allow the worker or technician, and when it worked to transform technical institutes into university colleges, thus implicitly confirming the high value of university education compared to everything else types of education? In this case, in turn, we find the prevailing mode of thinking and evaluation of individuals as a reflection of a method which is much broader than it, which the state itself, directly or indirectly, works to propagate in society.

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