What is the Purpose of School?

Context

As I get to the end of the academic quarter, I wanted to recap an assignment that I completed that has started to shift my perspective on what is important in the education of students. In this assignment I had to interview several stakeholders in the education process. I interviewed people from several different groups of stakeholders. I interviewed the following:

Multiple K-12 teachers
K-12 students
A parent
A paraprofessional
A graduate student
A graduate professor.

I felt as though this group gave me a great cross-sections of perspectives of those who would have the most at stake in our current education system. I interviewed each stakeholder with a series of questions designed to find out their views and experiences in education:

What is worth knowing?
What is worth needing?
What is worth experiencing?
What is worth doing?
What is worth being?
What is worth becoming?
What is worth overcoming?
What is worth sharing?
What is worth contributing?
What is worth wondering?

The open-ended nature of these questions led to some very interesting conversations with the various stakeholders as much of the conversation was spent coming to a common understanding as to what information should be elicited from each. While this was a little stressful for my first interview, as I became involved with other stakeholders these conversations got much easier. In fact, I believe that these discussions ended up creating more report between the stakeholders and myself. I believe that this level of trust led to deeper information being shared by the stakeholders

Key Findings

The most important theme that I found through this assignment is that all of the stakeholders involved in this assignment felt as though school should focus more on developing the “soft skills” (i.e., social skills) as opposed to traditional academics. Whether it was students who did not feel a connection between their education and the life they envisioned for themselves post high school or the teachers who felt as though they needed to spend time directly teaching social skills, the importance of a focus on non-academic skills was something that was unanimous between stakeholders. As a group, the stakeholders all expressed that the soft skills, and especially social skills, were what actually led to a student’s success after high school as opposed to academic skills which may or may not be applicable.
Stakeholders also felt that the content being taught in schools was less that helpful. Many stakeholders, when asked about traditional academics, answered with some form of the statement: “How would [the students] actually use that?” One stakeholder in particular felt as though students who have to take classes where they have little to no interest would only provide the effort that they needed to pass the course and would not actually invest in that aspect of their education. In contrast, stakeholders felt as though a student’s education should focus more on real-world contexts and hands on learning opportunities rather than just building academic skills. One stakeholder stated “Only physicists use advanced physics” when discussing how many of the education opportunities that students receive are simply educators checking boxes.
Adults and learners had differing views on the grading process, but in an unexpected way. Adults universally indicated that they felt that grading, even when “equitable” methods were utilized where largely demoralizing and demotivating for students. The consensus was that grading, as it is currently implemented, is more trouble than it is worth and is a detriment to a student’s education career. However, students indicated that they felt that grades were motivating and indicated that they felt validation from getting good grades on assignments. I was very surprised by this development because I expected that many of the adults to discuss grading in a more positive light while students felt more negatively. This could lead to interesting questions for further study.
The final theme that I wanted to discuss in this post is that of responsibility. Many of the stakeholders for this project indicated that they felt that schools had a responsibility, not only to the students, but also to the community at large. This responsibility was often explicitly stated as the school having a responsibility to produce students who would directly benefit the area or simply teaching students to “surpass” their current educators to become better citizens, this theme of responsibility was a very powerful one.

There are more themes and findings that I want to discuss with this post, as well as implications and questions that I have for further investigation, but that will have to wait until a future time.