Sample of Expository Essay on Education
Innovative
Education
The term “innovative education” has been presented to
scientific community by American pedagogue James Botkin about twenty years ago
and received numerous and rather controversial response, for it suggested
complete and irreversible revision of the principles traditional educational
theories consider to be axiomatic.
To begin with, while traditional education considers
the main value of educational process to be the knowledge transferred to the student,
Botkin’s innovative education presents the knowledge as a means rather than an
end, at the same time orienting at the development of the student’s personality
through knowledge. It is less concerned with controlling the educational
process, trying to create circumstances in which the student would establish
his or her own goals and achieve them, while transforming his or her own self
and self-regulating the studying process.
Traditional education represents in itself more or
less stable structure, without undergoing dramatic differences in the course of
years. The accumulation of knowledge goes on, of course, but only in the
subjects where it is impossible to avoid, for example, history and literature,
which are being expanded all the time. Curriculum for exact sciences, like
physics or mathematics may not change for decades. Botkin offers another
decision, which presupposes that educational system is dynamic, ever-changing
structure that is being regrouped and renewed constantly, with new programs and
educational disciplines appearing all the time.
As opposed to reproductive nature of traditional
education (the student perceives information and reproduces it), innovative
education is supposed to be only and specifically creative process. It should
teach students to create text irrespectively of its subject, understand
information even if it has never been perceived by the student yet, solve any
problems by means of independent thinking rather than applying pre-existing,
memorized solutions.
It also cancels the long-lasting tradition of
relationship “teacher-student” as “superior-inferior”, making both the teacher
and the student equal participants of educational process, who work on one and
the same task in cooperation, rather than submission. Any kind of outside
control is supposed to be harmful for the process and, therefore, abolished,
with its place taken by self-control, mutual control and coordination.
Of course, the self-sufficient system of education
based on equality of teacher and student may look really alluring, but all the
same, it is more of a utopia than reality. Botkin idealizes children and thinks
that it is possible to create such system; reality would most likely say “no”.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar