The Collective Quest: Ends and Means in Education

Abstract

There was a time not many years ago when the ends and means of education did not present a problem of much complexity. Good teachers, willing students were the ingredients of education, and with rapport between them, one might look forward to an educated population of some merit. Today this is not so. For knowledge has brought with it some understanding of the complexity involved in the ingredients of the educational process. The concerted pattern of education still involves a teacher certainly, who is still the heart of the matter. But to make possible the growth and true development of the teacher, to enable him or her to deal with the growth of knowledge, one has to think of a variety of other sources and materials of education. One has to think of a curriculum or general framework within which he works and within which subject-fields are defined in progressive steps for progressive age-groups of students. One has to thinks of textbooks that cannot be equated with the teacher, but that can make better teachers of good teachers, and less bad teachers of bad teachers. One has to think of experimental instructional materials, teachers’ handbooks and students’ workbooks to accompany textbooks, and, in order to develop these, one has to plan for workshops in which the teacher shall be an active participant, and carry out organized research in the total process of education. One has to think of how to enlarge the subject-content of teaching at school level and not merely to make a fetish of methodology, though methods do matter.