What does education mean?

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I agree that both education and learning should be lifelong activities. I very much enjoy looking at maps and my daily game of Globle. It could be said that l was taught how to read maps by school and my parents; ie l was educated in this matter. By continuing in this vein, l am educating myself and learning more about world geography at the same time.
Some people, DH among them, think that the only goal of education is for qualifications to further a career. I disagree. An old friend of mine has, in his early sixties, been awarded a PHD - a tremendous achievement. I was awarded my music degree in 1986 and have worked as a piano, violin and viola teacher, as well as being an accompanist, all my working life. I also have three adult children, no grandchildren yet. In 2023, at the age of 58, I took semi-retirement and now teach part-time. I now have time to make music and learn new pieces for my own pleasure once again. I have joined a chamber orchestra and it is such fun, as well as extremely satisfactory to play beautiful music to a very high standard with like-minded people. I am also working towards music diplomas from Trinity College, London on piano and viola (first and second instruments). These come at three levels - Associate (ATCL), Licentiate (LTCL) and Fellowship (FTCL). I am working towards ATCL on the viola and LTCL on the piano. My dream is to achieve the FTCL on the piano eventually. If I do well enough in the ATCL on the viola, l would love to work towards the LTCL. These are professional qualifications and I would be entitled to wear academic dress. DH has asked me why I want to take these very difficult exams at this point in my career - the end rather than the beginning, but I did not have the time to put in the practise involved because I had a busy, thriving teaching practice and was bringing up three children. It is my time to do something for myself as well as everything else l do.

recreational education

What would you define as recreational education David49?
Art, Music, Sport? Home economics including cookery, crafts?

All with the possibility of leading to fulfilling careers.

Teenaged years are the most formative you will ever have the decisions you make affect your whole life, the friends you make, the relationships, the attention you pay to learning, the option subjects to study further. At that stage I believe that a student should concentrate on employability skills because earning wages are going to high on the agenda quickly.

In the final 2 yrs those that learn about and get basic skills in the jobs they are seeking are the ones that get the jobs. It’s important that you concentrate on whatever career you are choosing, recreational education can take a back seat for now.

Rubbish, that is total nonsense. Anyway what is an employability skill? The capacity to think creatively, take responsibility, respond to opportunities offered? The world is far more flexible than you paint it. I have a friends who left school at 16 and went nowhere for 3 or 4 years then woke up at 20 and went on to qualify in all sorts of careers that they had never thought of before. One ended up a judge.

My own DD did a degree in acting, worked in the media for 20 years, did a STEM degree at the Open University in her 40s and now works for a major bank in cyber security. Careers like hers are not uncommon.

Most people's friends reflect every decade and stage of their lives. When I look at my own contemporaries, and my children and their friends, those who have had the best, most enjoyable, not necessarily best paid careers, are those who have been precisely the opposite of those you describe David. the ones who questioned the status quo, who went travelling, or waitressing, or sat on a riverbank and looked at the water.

People capable of thinking creatively and reinventing themselves and always adaptable.

growstuff

David49

Yes there are those that start late, those that restart but get it right first time because it’s their best option. The majority of us are going to be robots on the treadmill, with AI it’s going to get worse let’s be smart robots, only the lucky ones get to be creative.

In that case, there's even more reason for schools etc to encourage students to be creative.

Absolutely.

If the 'world of work' is divided into robotic types who follow orders and those who are lucky enough to 'be creative', why not skew education towards the latter and give everyone a chance to to join them?

It doesn't sound as though the former group need to know much more than how to do as they are told.

Elegran

That to Iam

And from me. x

Allira

X post growstuff but I think we are saying basically the same.

Yes, I think we are.

Allira

David49

Doodledog

Thank you, growstuff. That's very kind.

I fear we are all wasting our time though. Virtually nobody seems to have the same experience or opinion as David, which would give most people pause for thought, but he's not listening - just ignoring things he can't answer and repeating ideas about how 'the world of work' works on one employment model only.

I can’t answer individually the barrage of points that you think you are scoring points on.

Teenaged years are the most formative you will ever have the decisions you make affect your whole life, the friends you make, the relationships, the attention you pay to learning, the option subjects to study further. At that stage I believe that a student should concentrate on employability skills because earning wages are going to high on the agenda quickly.
In the final 2 yrs those that learn about and get basic skills in the jobs they are seeking are the ones that get the jobs. It’s important that you concentrate on whatever career you are choosing, recreational education can take a back seat for now.

Teenaged years are the most formative you will ever have the decisions you make affect your whole life, the friends you make, the relationships, the attention you pay to learning, the option subjects to study further. At that stage I believe that a student should concentrate on employability skills because earning wages are going to high on the agenda quickly.

I'm not sure I agree.

Many pupils do mess around at school but find, when they are a little older, that they have found a vocation or at least a job they enjoy with prospects and will work towards that, gaining skills, experience and qualifications.

Adaptability, motivation and drive are all desirable too as not all teenagers know exactly what they want to do as a career. In fact, adaptability is an essential attribute as many may need to retrain, rethink career options in today's world.

Indeed! I read an article which claimed that today's young people may have to change their job types three or four times (or more) during their lives.

David49

Yes there are those that start late, those that restart but get it right first time because it’s their best option. The majority of us are going to be robots on the treadmill, with AI it’s going to get worse let’s be smart robots, only the lucky ones get to be creative.

In that case, there's even more reason for schools etc to encourage students to be creative.

My experience of AI is that they are just better than human, smarter and even more emotionally intelligent

It may be doom 😂

Iam64

You’re a proper profit of doom David

😂

You’re a proper profit of doom David

Yes there are those that start late, those that restart but get it right first time because it’s their best option. The majority of us are going to be robots on the treadmill, with AI it’s going to get worse let’s be smart robots, only the lucky ones get to be creative.

Oreo

Having once worked in a supermarket I can tell you that everything is dictated from the top, even the displays of anything.There’s no room for any innovation or blue sky thinking😄
Why isn’t it being acknowledged on here that many jobs are boring and repetitive and only done for the money? Of course they are.

Nobody is saying that there are no jobs that are boring and repetitive. We are saying that not all jobs are boring and repetitive, which is not the same thing at all, and that an education can equip people for the ones that are not.

This is similar to when on the other thread about Reform people were accused of being satisfied with (or defending) the education system when they were simply pointing out that generalisations are not evidence, that not all students/graduates are 'clueless' and 'the world of work' is not the same for everyone.

X post growstuff but I think we are saying basically the same.

David49

Doodledog

Thank you, growstuff. That's very kind.

I fear we are all wasting our time though. Virtually nobody seems to have the same experience or opinion as David, which would give most people pause for thought, but he's not listening - just ignoring things he can't answer and repeating ideas about how 'the world of work' works on one employment model only.

I can’t answer individually the barrage of points that you think you are scoring points on.

Teenaged years are the most formative you will ever have the decisions you make affect your whole life, the friends you make, the relationships, the attention you pay to learning, the option subjects to study further. At that stage I believe that a student should concentrate on employability skills because earning wages are going to high on the agenda quickly.
In the final 2 yrs those that learn about and get basic skills in the jobs they are seeking are the ones that get the jobs. It’s important that you concentrate on whatever career you are choosing, recreational education can take a back seat for now.

Teenaged years are the most formative you will ever have the decisions you make affect your whole life, the friends you make, the relationships, the attention you pay to learning, the option subjects to study further. At that stage I believe that a student should concentrate on employability skills because earning wages are going to high on the agenda quickly.

I'm not sure I agree.

Many pupils do mess around at school but find, when they are a little older, that they have found a vocation or at least a job they enjoy with prospects and will work towards that, gaining skills, experience and qualifications.

Adaptability, motivation and drive are all desirable too as not all teenagers know exactly what they want to do as a career. In fact, adaptability is an essential attribute as many may need to retrain, rethink career options in today's world.

David49

Doodledog

Thank you, growstuff. That's very kind.

I fear we are all wasting our time though. Virtually nobody seems to have the same experience or opinion as David, which would give most people pause for thought, but he's not listening - just ignoring things he can't answer and repeating ideas about how 'the world of work' works on one employment model only.

I can’t answer individually the barrage of points that you think you are scoring points on.

Teenaged years are the most formative you will ever have the decisions you make affect your whole life, the friends you make, the relationships, the attention you pay to learning, the option subjects to study further. At that stage I believe that a student should concentrate on employability skills because earning wages are going to high on the agenda quickly.
In the final 2 yrs those that learn about and get basic skills in the jobs they are seeking are the ones that get the jobs. It’s important that you concentrate on whatever career you are choosing, recreational education can take a back seat for now.

Not in my experience!

Having two children in their late 20s/early 30s, I know plenty of young people who really didn't know what they wanted to do when they left school/college/university. They couldn't learn about the basic skills in the jobs they were seeking because they didn't know what jobs they were seeking.

Some of them found a job straight away, including one of my son's best friends who now has a six figure salary. Others took what jobs they could and worked out what they wanted to do. My daughter was one of those. She worked in a bar organising events such as stag nights before applying to the Civil Service's Fast Stream and being appointed. The bar work had nothing to do with what she does now. Another friend started off as an opera singer and now works with special needs children doing music therapy - she loves her job. Every single one of the young people my children know has a job.

That to Iam

In days gone by, people thought of women in the same limited way. Because they possessed the ability to do what no man could do - bear children - the prevailing philosophy was that this was the only thing they would be doing, so they needed only to be able to do things related to that.

What a waste of the talents and abilities of half the human race!

Of course, not everyone in retail works for a supermarket chain. In the UK, SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) account for approximately 60% of the total private sector employment. This means that over three in five people working in the UK private sector are employed by a business with fewer than 250 employees.

You would be more likely to have your boss listen to your ideas in an SME than in a chain which wants to maintain the smallest details of its corporate image. You have more chance of rising up the food chain to a position where your decisions matter, too. With more than half the workforce in small or medium entrprises, this raises another reason why a wide education from the start is important. Note - by "education" I mean here knowing how to assess the trustworthiness of information, be aware of repeating patterns, rank things in various order (priority action, relative value, and how to plan a course of action, carry it out, and assess its success or failure)

Given the large number of people employed in each big chain, it stands to reason that there are many more small enterprises with many more bosses than there are big chains with fewer bosses, so more people are likely to climb the ladder and have responsibility for the success of the business and the well-being of those who work in it. While much of the work-load of "the boss" is based on knowledge and experience of the kind of work carried on there, much of it also needs the basics of the skills in my previous paragraph, plus there will be endless paperwork to do.

Who is likely to be in the hot seat of these SMEs? People who started work there at the bottom and have risen from the ranks to be supervisors and undermanagers. If all they had learnt was that their task in life was to do as they are told, they would still be at the bottom.

Your response to Doodledog adds to the picture you paint of yourself as a rather arrogant individual who thinks in a limited way
To suggest Doodledog believes she’s scoring points made me smile ironically

To educate is to.lead out (from latin). You lead someone out of their ignorance of something so it's anything where you learn something.

It ia lazy people who invent the labour-saving devices and methods, too - the hardworking, "do it the time-honoured way" ones don't mind working harder and spending long on it.

I worked in a crisp factory.

People created games.

Biggest potato of the day.
Rudest shaped crisp
Most prolific packer
Rubber glove puppet
Pop the crisp bag (much frowned upon)

And stuff that wasn’t crisp related too.

Teabreak crossword
Sing along the line

People are endlessly creative when bored

Oreo

Having once worked in a supermarket I can tell you that everything is dictated from the top, even the displays of anything.There’s no room for any innovation or blue sky thinking😄
Why isn’t it being acknowledged on here that many jobs are boring and repetitive and only done for the money? Of course they are.

They are.

Trying to make the most out of shelf-stacking was difficult. I only did it for six months. However, the till operators at our local supermarket are always cheerful, even those who have to stand around ready to help customers with the self-service tills, even though the concept might mean redundancy.