What does education mean?

Iam64

You’re a proper profit of doom David

😂

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

It may be doom 😂

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.

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.

Allira

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

Yes, I think we are.

Elegran

That to Iam

And from me. x

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Allira

^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.

Musicgirl has an excellent example of recreational education, just for the sake of it to prove you can, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the education and decisions a child makes in their teenaged years.

We never stop learning, what I have been saying is that schools should concentrate on the education that will enable them to have a rewarding working life. There isn’t a problem with most children but a minority do have great challenges changing from an education to working environment.

Practically all posts seem to be hostile to changing anything, if you all think that the education system is fine don’t change anything there is no point me whistling in the wind.

The education system is not fine, but until we find a better way of educating around 10 million children all at the same time, it won't change drastically. It has to work for the majority and as it is, it offers a way of measuring academic ability and performance levels. I think some of the curriculum is just teaching monkeys tricks, but that's a different area for discussion.

The potential in every child can be recognised fairly on, but it isn't as simple as just stretching the individual to succeed. So many other factors come into play.

I don't think people are hostile to change, they are hostile to your sterile view of school education.

Are they to be allowed a rewarding weekend, or rewarding evenings, once their rewarding working life has paid for their rent and living expenses but left their inner self strangely unsatisfied?

Team games, perhaps, to enjoy the competitive pleasure of joining with team-mates against a common foe opposition?

A solo sport like athletics or cycling which pits the individual against other individuals or against their own personal best?

A musical instrument, from guitar to bagpipes, for the pleasure of creating music, or a choir where the instrument is the human voice (very inexpensive and already in the possession of everyone)?

Starting earlier at one of these or similar (which are often classed as unnecessary luxuries in schools) can give a person a sense of their worth and a focus for the time when they are not engaged in their employment. If they have no experience of them in the home, being exposed to them at school can show them that they are not just for the elite experts, but for all. While

One of the minority who have "have great challenges changing from an education to working environment" in particularly could be helped to reconcile to the long boring day at work by having the prospect of doing something different once they down tools.

While "Musicgirl has an excellent example of recreational education, just for the sake of it to prove you can" , many a young person (probably most) makes or enjoys music in one way or another in their teenaged years, some play musical indtruments, some travel to concerts or listen to their favourite genres online, from classical music to the latest ear-busters. It has a great deal to do with their wider education and development - the education of their senses and emotions. Life is more than work, and an effective workforce has a satisfying life outside work as well as in it.

My DD's decision to do a degree in STEM subjects at the OU, rose from an interest in astronomy that started with seeing the milkyway for the first time in a truly black sky.

She signed up for a one off astronomy course, at the OU, and one led to another, and that awakened the latent engineer in her so she started studying science subjects and so it progressed, until she got serious and decided to do a degree. When she got it that led to a completely new and lucrative career.

All starting from a bit of recreational education.

It has a great deal to do with their wider education and development - the education of their senses and emotions.
Nicely put, Elegran. And their eagerness to be receptive.

escaped

^It has a great deal to do with their wider education and development - the education of their senses and emotions.^
Nicely put, Elegran. And their eagerness to be receptive.

Yes, and an awareness of what is available for them to learn. Not all children grow up in families that nurture their inquisitiveness - whether from lack of interest or just because they themselves are unaware of what's out there.

Schools can (and should, IMO) introduce children to music, drama, poetry, astronomy etc and let them find out where their interests lie. I have no idea whether I could have had a successful career as an ornithologist, for instance*, as we didn't study birds at school, neither I nor my parents knew any ornithologists, and I don't suppose I was even aware that there were careers in that field.

*I probably wouldn't, as I'm not a great lover of the outdoors, and have only a passing interest in wildlife, but it's just an example of how 'preparing for the world of work' need not be about learning to obey orders and carry out routine tasks.

David wrote:

"If you think education is the discovery of new things and new experiences that’s a problem. When you start the world of work that ends because you are entering an existing system that doesn’t change, repeating the same tasks day by day, until you complete more training and get promoted.

School is a combination of education and training maths, english, science could be termed training, history, geography, literature largely education"

While I think a mathematician or scientist may be educated it's sadly true that an undergraduate curriculum has no time for history and philosophy of mathematics or science.

It was also true that in the bad old days an employer may stipulate that workers must be illiterate. I have sometimes wondered if something of the sort applies to some work situations today even if not mentioned explicitly.
I must ask ChatGPT what it knows.

ChatGTP answered
my question
"Is it the case that even today 2025 some employers prefer that some workers are not educated?"

David it seems your idea is correct, but not in every case of employment.

This discussion has reminded me of a conversation with an old school friend which took place about 20 years ago. We were talking about the unpleasant holiday jobs we did when we were teenagers, happy to take any work going for six weeks, often in grotty factories. It was just a way to earn some money to buy clothes, make-up and records. My worst job was in a cockroach-infested steam laundry. We got onto the subject of job satisfaction, musing on when that became something that people felt entitled to.

I’ve looked up job satisfaction in the OED. The first recorded written appearance was in an American educational journal published in 1935. The next example is from the British journal Accountant published 1972 - so it seems a relatively recent demand for want of a better word.

This made me think about Bertram Russell’s essay In Praise of Idleness. This was published in 1932 so it was of its time but it also has much to say that is relevant today.

Here it is:

files.libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf

This should be seen in context, written at a time of high unemployment and severe economic depression. We still have high rates of unemployment now but for different reasons.

He was advocating that people should only work a four-hour day and have more time for active (rather than passive) leisure pursuits:

Quote:

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours' work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered 'highbrow'. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

Our economy had long been based around the eight hour day or even longer. It would take a massive, arguably impossible, shift to change that but it is something that governments will have to face as AI takes over routine work.

Would the most mundane means-to-an-end job become more tolerable if the working day was shorter, allowing more time in Russell’s words, ^ to use leisure intelligently, to allow education to be carried further than it is at present ^ for everybody?

Otherwise what do people do? They spend all their active energies on work. They come home, slump in front of the TV, are fed adverts that tell them their life is rubbish if they don’t have the latest car, luxury holiday, a new sofa, a new kitchen appliance or Flash-clean floor. So they go out and buy all this stuff on credit and then have to work even longer hours to pay for it. If people weren’t trapped in this capitalist system and had more time for active leisure including continuing education I suspect people would be a lot happier.

You wouldn't think that there is a career in walking miles in rough country, either, but there is.

A young relative has just graduated and is about to start her first full-time job - which promises to be anything but boring.She has always gone hill-walking and rock-climbing with her family (and she has also played squash since her schooldays, so is very fit) she liked animals, mostly as pets - but what teenage girl doesn't. She did well in her A-levels, and was accepted for a science course at University. she had no idea of what career she would go for at that point.

One of the elements of the course was biology, where she learnt a lot about the physiology and life of various types of animals.

The final year of biology had projects and field work, where the students set up studies on animals in the wild, collected results daily, and analysed the findings with statistical tools - she enjoyed that immensely. It included long and often uphill treks to the study sites, which were never conveniently near a car park. This put off some of the students, but to someone who climbed mountains for pleasure, this was not a problem.

Then she took part informally in a real-life study by a local firm who did this kind of study for developers before they put in an application for planning permission. By the time that had finished she was sure that was what she wanted to do - and she will now be employed full-time doing it.

She has the interest and knowledge about wildlife and concern for their welfare, the knowledge and experience of studying them in the wild, the stamina to do the trudging about in rain or shine collecting data, and the mathematical and statistical ability to collate those results and interpret them.

Had she not already developed an interest in walking in the countryside for its own sake, she might not have embraced the physical demands of ecology as a career.

Caleo We all know that President Trump just loves illiterate and ignorant people.

the most interesting discussion here in a very long time, thanks.

Elegran you are right it is a political question concerning the sort of regime that governs a country. Trump and Co want to divide society into social classes and have already made inroads against Harvard University. Reason is universal but Trump and Co want to limit the use of reason to the governing elite . That way, the governing elite get more money and power for themselves.