David Santos Martinez"In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it." - Sir William Haley.
First of all, I have to apologize because I couldn’t start talking about this controversial topic with only one choice from all those sentences which are, in my opinion, as ingenious as true.
The reason why I have chosen two of these statements is because neither of them was giving me a full description of the effort that education should do but a part of it.
The first factor we must bear in mind is the individuality of education. We are all completely different people who learn to interpret and assimilate concepts in particular ways. So trying to teach thirty people with all these unique features in the same class is nothing but a waste of time if our purpose is to form fully prepared members of the society ready to face the day after tomorrow with effectiveness. Unfortunately, this is the case we live nowadays, and the idea of an educational system in which students are taught individually can only be conceived in our imagination.
Now, about the second declaration, we must see that another key factor during the education of the pupils is the stimulation of curiosity. Very often, in the schools, the content of each subject is exposed in a very curt and monotone way which, obviously, can turn the most interesting topic into a boring one. Whereas the same topic, done in an active way in which the class gets completely involved by arousing its interest and where the students are moved by the intrigue of knowing the final answer, can be absolutely fascinating. However, to reach this point, the system (the government) should “create” this kind of fantastic teachers, and the main problem of doing this is that training a teacher who just shows the contents of a certain subject requires much less time than instructing a teacher who knows how to attract the students.
For me, taking deeply into account the ideas of “individuality” and “curiosity”, the perfect educational system could be built, but the problem is that the requirements are far beyond our possibilities at the moment, so, meanwhile, the teachers will be opening the doors and you will have to enter by yourself (another sentence from the list), and don’t turn your back, because, as I see it, a slightly bad education is better than no education at all.
I liked what Sir William Haley said. While we're studying at school or university we think that we've absorbed all information and so much knowledge. However, after we graduate we realize that we have not and we start to think what other things we haven't studied yet. It's like when playing football, you don't pay attention to what happens around you outside the field because you're in the field, but when you finish you realize what was happening around you.
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