Three Essential Goals of Education No One Talks About

The focus is on ending Black dropouts. When dropout factories continue to exist, it begs the question, what are the goals of education.

While I firmly believe that the education of our youth is a local issue and not a federal one, each locality should be clear about their educational goals.

Here I am offering a guide for developing specific educational goals.

1. The goal of a good education is to help young people to become both more receptive to and more discriminating about the world: seeing, feeling, and understanding more, yet sorting the pertinent from the irrelevant with a more discerning touch, increasingly able to integrate what they see and to make meaning of it in ways that enhance their ability to keep on growing.

2. The goal of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broad and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is for first-graders as well as for graduate students, for fledging artists as well as for graying accountants.

3. The final goal of education in the schools should be to create men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done ; men and women who are creative, inventive, and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept everything they are offered.


What are your thoughts. Do you think these goals are realistic?

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The Sad State of American Education

America ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of students receiving undergraduate degrees in science and engineering.

US undergraduate institutions award 16% of their degrees in the natural sciences or engineering. South Korea and China award 38% and 47%, respectively.

On the Program for International Student Assessment exam, students in Hong Kong and Shanghai dominated their counterparts in the US, and most other countries and most other countries in Science and Technology.

 A record number of high school students taking and passing Advanced Placement exams are scoring at the lowest level possible, according to national data on 2010 graduates. In science, students in 16 countries outscored American students.

According to a 2006 program for international student assessment exam, 15-year-old American students placed a dismal 23rd out of 29 participating countries in mathematics.

Fewer than one third of elementary and high school students have a solid grasp on science. China, Japan, and Finland are all ahead of the US.

To put this in perspective, for years the US dominated the science and technology fields and filed record numbers of patents which in turn empowered its military and fueled its economy.

This matters because our country desperately relies on mathematicians and engineers to remain at the cusp of technological advances. The failure to prepare tomorrow's leaders in math and science is a threat to our country's global standing.

Finally, where does Black students fit in this sad situation? Take a look a Chicago Failing Schools.

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