What Education Is; Clip 1 Video Lecture | Philosophy of Education: Introductory Course - Self Help Learning

I'm going to take this initial
definition as serving generically for
any species in the development of which
the young have a process of learning
before they are ready to function fully
as adults of whatever type of species
that they are of course most plants they
don't have any learning component other
species perhaps like insects and fish at
most will have a minimal amount of
learning that they engage in in their
lives before their fully functioning
adults for more complicated species
though it may be a matter of a season
cats for example might be born in the
spring learn over the course of several
months as they are growing into a doll
cats and then by the fall come to sexual
maturity and know everything that they
need to know to function as adult cats
dogs typically are a little bit longer
dolphins chimpanzees and elephants
complicated species like that their
maturity is a longer process a matter of
many years but even in the case of those
more complicated animals the amount of
actual learning and education that they
need to acquire in order to be able to
function as adults in that species is is
much less than the amount of time that
human beings engage in their education
as that points up I think one important
philosophically charged fact about human
education that I want to draw our
attention to at the outset that is the
length of time that we as human beings
devote to this process of Education by
the time for example even if we take as
a baseline peu brie say here
biologically and hopefully
psychologically a young human being is
going through the process of becoming an
adult human being that is 12 to 13 years
on average and so the idea is that
childhood being a process of a dozen
years or more and that the primary thing
that the student should be engaged in or
that the young person should be engaged
in that point is being a student or
learning the things that he or she needs
to be able to function as a human being
that is an enormous in
in in time
the other important thing and I think
distinctive thing about human education
is that we engage in the process
systematically right so I'm going to use
an abstract noun systematicity in the
other animal species even those other
animal species for which there is an
extended learning period before the the
young animal becomes an adult the
educational process is largely a matter
of hit or miss right when an opportunity
arises for the say the mother wolf to
teach the young cub a lesson in hunting
then a hunting lesson will ensue right
or any sort of other lesson that arises
but it's more opportunistic and over the
course in a helter-skelter kind of
fashion that the young animal will be
exposed to the kinds of things that Yee
or she needs to know in order to
function as an adult when we as human
beings do our education education of our
young we don't do it helter-skelter for
the most part we shouldn't be doing it
and we don't do it that way we think
about what we're doing we're thinking
systematically in the following sense we
want the students to know these things
these things these things and so forth
and we come up with a hopefully
thoroughly itemized list of all the
things that we want the student to know
all of the skills that we want the
person to know the character traits if
we include character traits that we want
the students to know we attended to
various developmental issues students
can't be exposed to these things before
they've learned these things they can't
learn these things before they learn
these things and so we're thinking about
this long process over the course of
many years and we're setting up the
process at the beginning to set up for
the middle to set up for the the
ultimate and penultimate parts of the
processes and so the idea then is that
we're developing systems right of
Education and then we bring the students
into that system right so to speak third
feature I want to emphasize is the
amount of not time that we invest in the
process but the amount of wealth that we
as human beings invest in the process
particularly as we culturally become
wealthier we start to devote
systematically more
resources both time resources and
monetary resources to the process of
education typically any family that is
moving from a state of poverty to a
state of not being in poverty they start
to acquire things that used to be
luxuries in their lives almost without
exception one of the first luxuries that
parents invest in is more education for
their children more books more schooling
more soccer lessons more piano lessons
and and so forth we can also track this
across cultures uh the amount of money
that we invest in the amount of time
that we invest goes up proportionately
as our culture's become older for
example I can recall in my grandparents
generation they were getting their
education in the first part of the 20th
century the standard for them
particularly in my family my last name
is Hicks so you might make a judgment
from there an accurate judgment that I
come from a long line of farmers but
they're the standard education that
which was thought to be proficient
preparation for adult life was to get up
to about eighth grade education and once
you've got your eighth grade diploma you
needed basically everything you needed
to know in order to be able to function
efficiently and productively as a farmer
in that that particular culture now that
in historical time is already at a major
investment of both wealth resources and
time resources in the early part of the
20th century by the time we get to say
my parents generation the expectations
has changed the culture was wealthier by
the time we got to the middle part of
the 20th century when my parents were
getting their education and their eighth
grade education was no longer considered
via sufficent everybody was expected to
give a high school a try and it started
to be a stigma attached to being a high
school dropout right so to speak so high
school graduation is then the new
standard and we're willing to make the
wealth commitment and the amount of time
commitment and so we're not expecting
students to be fully functioning adults
by the time they're 13 or 14 instead
we're expecting them to be fully
functional adults by the time they are
17 or 18 by the time we get to my
education getting my education
the latter part of the twentieth century
again the culture is wealthier society
is more complicated we can also afford
to have an extended childhood but there
the expectations changed and the
expectation was that people of my
generation everybody should give College
a try now my understanding is that by
the early part of the 20th century only
about 23 to 25 percent of the adult
Canadian and American population has a
college degree but the new aspiration is
being set that given college is a try
and now as we're getting into the 21st
century in the wealthy countries going
on for graduate school to get a
professional degree or a PhD is also
something that we are encouraging more
systematically and and more broadly the
point that is if you put all of these
three together the length of time that
we as human beings investigate or invest
rather in education the systematic
process that we are engaging in and the
amount of wealth that we are asking
ourselves and other people to spend on
this particular problem this bears
thinking upon so if this is what we're
doing and we're safe for example by the
time we ran our generation college
graduates a student is 22 years or so
for the first 22 years of this person's
life we want their primary focus to be
on education and of course maybe having
a part-time job here and they're doing
their chores and having lots of time for
fun but primarily their project is the
educational process of learning to be a
fully functional adult what are we doing
right that warrants that enormous
expenditure of wealth what are we doing
such that we are investing 22 years of
that child's life and what system are we
going to put in place that warrants that
amount of wealth being spent in that
amount of time being put to the time the
extent that we start then thinking about
those questions we're necessarily going
to bump into philosophical questions
we're starting to think strategically in
terms of the big picture of Education
anytime you start to think strategically
in big-picture about anything you're
entering a territory of philosophy and
that will be my next topic what's this
got to do with philosophy