Far-Reaching Vision of Education

"At the heart of education are two questions: What kind of people do we want to be? What kind of world do we want to live in?" write Ann Pelo and Margie Carter in their important new book, From Teaching to Thinking.

"Our answers to these questions help us answer a third question: What is the purpose of education, and how do we go about achieving it?

What answers might we deduce from the current pressures to inscribe early childhood programs with standardized, scripted curriculum that emphasizes literacy and numeracy at the cost of vigorous play and rigorous exploration? Pressures to administer a barrage of assessments to three-, four-, and five-year-old children? We can read, in these pressures, the conviction that early education is about school readiness, and that school is significant because it prepares young people for work. This understanding of education arises from particular answers to the two core questions: What kind of people do we want to be? Productive workers. What kind of world do we want to live in? A society in which success is measured through competition and achievement is calculated in the currency of the marketplace.

Something in us recoils from those answers. We demand a more generous and far-reaching vision for the purpose of education—a vision that relocates the meaning of education from school readiness to authentic intellectual development, relational and emotional capacity, and attention to social and ecological justice."

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