Педагогические науки/4. Стратегические направления реформирования системы образования

Grytsai Svetlana

National Aviation University (Kyiv, Ukraine)

AN EDUCATION THAT MAKES SENSE

Most students want their education to be practical and realistic. They feel a good deal better if they can see that is vocational. They like to have some say in choosing what they shall study. We believe that these four words – practical, realistic, vocational, choice – provide keys which can be used to let even the least able students enter into an educational experience. This article of definitions is necessary because these four words have been so bandied about that it often appears that those who use them mean almost contradictory things.

‘Practical’ work leads not only to success which is easily recognized, but to success which is obviously worth while. The ‘practical subjects’ (practical training at the university) have special value for less able students also because it is often easier to make the bridge between university studying and plants, organizations or firms in these subjects than in other. Here is an easy gate to one of the qualities that makes higher education. It is in contexts like these that we use the word practical: and it is for these and similar reasons that, without underestimating its value for students, we find it an indispensable key to providing really training elements in the higher education of the students .

‘Realistic’ in our usage is a word that has a good many affiliations with ‘practical’, but it is applied more particularly to situations in which people find themselves. Realistic stands to the classroom subjects in the same kind of relation that practical does to those carried on in the workshops and the laboratories. To set a class to study a carefully defined problem in human conduct and human relations into which students can project themselves and work out the various implications of different courses of action – this is realistic teaching. But if, for instance, some way is found of relating this information to a real situation with which the students are or want to be familiar – household budgeting, gross and net wages are obvious examples – it becomes useful information which is obviously worth acquiring. To our students ‘realistic’ means belonging to the real world.

‘Vocational’ is a dangerous but indispensable word. It rightly means all that belongs to a man’s calling. That itself is no doubt an old-fashioned word, but at least it suggests that there is more to a job than money. This is recognized by the still current use of the term to describe the process by which a man discovers whether he ought to be priest. This meaning runs the risk of being lost in the narrow context in which a course in ‘civil engineering’ about bricklaying is no doubt rightly described as vocational education. Probably at first students only think of a subject as vocational if it involves learning to do something, like bricklaying, which is part of the way people earn their living and which is not related to university studying as they have hitherto known it. They can see the point of a vocational subject and often enjoy it whether they themselves are going to take up this kind of work or not. One they begin to clear their own minds about what they are going to do, vocational takes on for them a more precise and yet a wider meaning. Probably the noun with which ‘vocational’ can most helpfully be associated at the university studying context is ‘guidance’. This is something which should run through much of the work in the last years at the university, which should be concerned with what the students are going to make of themselves as young specialists.

The next step forward in life should be seen and talked about positively as going to work, not negatively as graduate from the university. This step needs to be prepared for in many ways through many subjects of the curriculum. Going to work means earning money, and this is important psychologically as well as financially. Both implication should be explored. Going to work means choosing between this and that opening. The ‘choice’ ought to be based on knowledge of what openings there are and what the jobs are like. This leads on to weighing one kind of consideration against another – the interest of the job, the pleasure of companionship, the fatigue of travelling, the size of the wage packet, the possibilities of promotion and many more. A right choice involves self-knowledge as well as knowledge of the job - what one can do and what once can’t. These are issues which the university will help its students to face, and will take great care to see that they are brought forward and not ignored.

The value of the practical training at the university is not thereby destroyed. It is worth its place both in general terms as part of the higher education of the person and also in the narrower vocational sense of providing broad experience in theoretical skills on the basis of which a reasonable judgment about employment can be made. The students value practical training because it has vocational relevance – possibly for them, certainly for others. It may be university, but it is also real. In the last years at the university the same realistic value, as we have already noticed, can be given to other subjects by vocational references without destroying their importance in their own right

Education at the university is like a menu meal. The subjects are there on the form time-table and are taken by all the form. There is no ‘choice’. Some universities continue in this way right up to the end; indeed as far as time-table making is concerned our survey shows that this is a great deal more common than the reverse and especially so where the less able students are concerned.

Their choice may also sometimes be dictated partly by personal reasons – the fact that they like one teacher or cannot get with another. Such personal likes or dislikes may seem frivolous reasons for selecting an educational curriculum; but they are certainly worth paying attention to for students who find studying difficult anyhow. This is especially true during adolescence when physiological changes make tremendous inroads on personal equanimity. To provide a means of avoiding a personal quarrel or enlist the support of a strong liking is often educational wisdom.

But to give students a sense of being free to choose does not always involve a choice between subjects or between teachers, both of which involve problems of time-table and organization which may be difficult to resolve. There is often a choice of craft or medium which can be made within a ‘practical subject’. This can go far to meet a growing student’s desire to follow his own bent and to follow it long enough to reach some real competence. Here the division of labor involved in a co-operative project can be used to give students some opportunity of contributing their own special interests and talents to the making of a greater whole. Single lessons may also be used to present students with the necessity and pleasure of making a personal decision.

An education which is practical, realistic and vocational in the sense in which we have used these words, and which provides some ground in which to exercise choice, is an education that makes sense to the students we have in mind. It should also make sense to the society in which they live and which provides their education. But if their education could be completely described in these words it would be sadly lacking. An education that makes complete sense must provide opportunity for personal fulfillment – for the good life as well as for good living. This is not, of course, a matter for a series of lessons. It is a quality to be sought, not a subject to be taught. One of the elements involved is that which shines out when the only possible answer to the question ‘why are you taking so much trouble to do this properly’, is ‘because I enjoy doing it’.

That is why it is not possible to offer a short and simple formula for the education of our students, in terms of additional lessons in English or more time in the workshop or extra bits of knowledge in this subject or that. The significant thing is the total impact. What will these young people be, and know, and be capable of doing, as a result of their time at the university? No student is a fully finished product as a human being; but each additional practical, realistic, vocational, choice subject in full-time education ought to be assisting the students in their process towards professionally career, and equipping them a little better to play their part in the world.

In short, we are saying that whatever lessons appear on the time-table, it is essential that the students be helped and stimulated by them to enlarge their understanding and practice their skills; that some direct experience, perhaps a search for further knowledge. The main difference at this university stage will be that there will be a need to deal with more interests and more subtle judgments, and to make more explicit the connections between what is done in one subject and another.

References

1. Goldstein, H. (1987) Multilevel models in education and social research. London: Charles Griffil & Co.

2. Barber, M. and Mourshed, M. (2007) How the world’s best education systems come out on top: London & New York, McKinsey.

3. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of practice. Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

4. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind and society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.