Relationship Between Education and Professional Life

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Table of Contents

Introduction
The modern education system
Summary
References

Introduction

Education and training have always played an important role in modern life since students and aspirates normally have a certain professional dream or ambition and seek to succeed in actualizing it. The relationship between education and professional life is unquestionable, but contemporary North Americans used to consider its utility too narrowly, given that education also involves upbringing, general development, and life skills training. The present paper addresses this issue from different perspectives.

The world is changing dynamically so that to develop the ability to plan their further education, career, and other vital ‘life schemes’, the students should be sensitive to the social environment, in which they operate. The pragmatism of modern education can appropriately meet this requirement: “Pragmatists believe that reality is constantly changing and that we learn best through applying our experiences and thoughts to problems, as they arise” (Ozmon and Craver, p. 351). Accordingly, Pragmatism in education highlights the importance of the learner’s adaptation to their environment. “Schools should emphasize the subject matter of social experience. All learning is dependent on the context of place, time, and circumstance. Different cultural and ethnic groups learn to work cooperatively and contribute to a democratic society” (Gutek, p. 212). This means, students are taught to work in groups, conduct joint experiments, and solve problems together – the importance of this skill is dictated by American individualism and exaggeration of uniqueness and individuality, which might have a negative side, as individuals may lose the ability to make decisions, which would be suitable for the entire group, organization or corporation the person belongs to. In addition, group work enhances interpersonal and communication skills, which are today extremely valuable in most occupations.

The modern education system

Furthermore, the modern education system, given its pragmatist framework, provides students with holistic learning (Gutek, p.111), as they are assigned to solve interdisciplinary problems and learn to tie or combine the approaches, developed by various areas of knowledge: e.g. certain life situations or ‘cases’ can be resolved through utilizing psychological and literary perspectives, others – through combining knowledge in Math, Physics and Chemistry. In general, experimental and empirical learning facilitates the person’s socialization, intellectual and cognitive maturation, so that the student gradually, year by year, develops social competence and the ability to contribute to the maintenance of reformation of the social order (Ozmon and Craver, p. 243).

Montessori, a prominent tutor, also suggests that school education should expose children to positive experiences so that they learn to be happy since their formative years and consequently become particularly productive and creative members of society (Montessori, p. 293); otherwise, the educational system is open to criticism and reforms: “Often the education of children consists in pouring into their intelligence the intellectual content of school programs. And often these programs have been compiled in the official department of education, and their use is imposed by law upon the teacher and the child” (Montessori, p. 294). Instead, she proposes the concept of a prepared environment, used nowadays in several educational institutions.

As one can understand from the paper, Montessori seeks to create an extremely warm and friendly learning environment, so that children develop their creativity through focusing on the activities they are interested in. This means the theorist emphasizes the child’s developmental needs rather than the need for socialization. As Dunkin and Biddle (1974) write, “In the calm, ordered space of the Montessori prepared environment, children work on activities of their own choice at their own pace. They experience a blend of freedom and self-discipline in a place specially designed to meet their developmental needs” (Dunkin and Biddle, p. 263). Montessori’s students develop their individualism, re-consider the concepts of personal freedom, and study at the most convenient place, so her paradigm is approached to the modern global values and help students learn them in their earliest and most sensitive years so that they grow into truly independent citizens and leaders.

Paul Freire, an outstanding Brazilian scholar, however, tends to challenge the modern banking concept of education, in which the teacher invests their knowledge, emotions, and energy into allegedly ignored and undeveloped students: “Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his existence” (Freire, p.319). At the same time, he suggests that education should avoid imposing oppression-submission relationships and posing teachers as a formally higher authority; instead, tutors should treat (to a reasonable degree) learners as their peers – this is the major precondition of growing true members of the democratic society. The basic ideas and methods of the liberatory educational system such as “thematic universe, keywords, codification-decommodification, dialogue, the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy, humanization, humility, love, hope, autonomy and the culture of silence” (Freire, 1998, p. 98) have been implemented, discussed and have undergone practical application since the early in many countries: Germany, U.S.A., U.K., France, Germany, in Latin America and many other states. Nowadays, the vast majority of American schools utilize both Freire’s and Montessori’s doctrines, both of which guide the liberalization of education and the comprehensive development of students’ talents; therefore, in the macrosocial dimension, education allows introducing human rights and freedom reforms at the deepest level of society.

One more contributor to the improvement of education and implementation of additional opportunity, cultural literacy obtaining, was E. Hirsch, who suggested in the 1980s that it was vital to move forward not every students’ specific knowledge, but also more general erudition. Hirsch writes: “Research has shown that reading doesn’t follow an orderly pattern, as used to be thought. We don’t first identify words, then word meanings, next combine word meanings to get the meanings of sentences and finally combine sentence meanings to get the meaning of the whole text…[…] This model […]presents a highly misleading picture of the way we understand texts” (Hirsch, p.33). After Hirsch’s experiments, the research suggests that those children who are not given background information, do not understand texts appropriately, i.e. perceive them in a state of illiteracy.

Furthermore, according to the writer, cultural literacy is determined by the depth of understanding of one’s national culture, but in daily routines, cultural literacy can be exemplified by a simple situation: a person takes a newspaper and comprehends everything they are reading about. Profound understanding of mainstream culture is an important feature each American should possess and make use of, and this is equally associated with messages from other cultures – in terms of our modern world, information about the Iraq war, and the Muslim world in general. Cross-cultural communication thus should include primarily the knowledge about the context and the nature of the culture. Nowadays, school and college education has become increasingly more comprehensive and saturated with new programs, courses, workshops, so to help younger students comprehend this information, a person with specialized competencies helps students feel more free and confident in the epoch of multiculturalism when mutual understanding is particularly needed. Furthermore, school education is accompanied by the special aspects of social upbringing, which might be overlooked by family. Development of skills and learning of knowledge is closely interwoven with the moral and ethical “evolution” of the young person, which includes their preparation for the coexistence with other individuals as well as social interaction. In the higher education institutions, the component of social tutorship is also included psychological development is ongoing in 18-25-year-olds and thus needs to be facilitated and directed to a more constructive side by the instructor.

Summary

To sum up, the personality and character of an individual are shaped at school, so the modern liberal arts education addresses the need for shaping open-minded personalities, mature enough to operate in a diverse environment. Beyond the classical knowledge, needed to obtain any profession, school, college, and university education creates a matrix and a foundation for mutual understanding between individuals, familiarizes students with novel technologies, develops value system, multiculturalism-conditioned erudition, and such vital life skills like critical and creative thinking, effective communication, and application of theoretical concepts to real-life situations.

References

Dunkin, M. and Biddle, B. The Study of Teaching. Rinehart and Winston, Holt, 1977.

Freire, P. “The Banking Concept of Education”. In A World of Ideas by Lee Jacobus (ed.), 7^th edition, pp. 315-330.

Freire, P. Pedagogy of Freedom. Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.

Gutek, G. Philosophical and Ideological Perspectives on Education. Prentice Hall, NJ, Englewood Cliffs, 1988.

Hirsch, E. D. Jr. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. 1987.

Montessori, M. “The Montessori Method”. In A World of Ideas by Lee Jacobus (ed.), 7^th edition, pp. 281-294.

Ozmon, H. and Craver, S. Philosophical Foundations of Education. Merrill, Columbus, 1981.

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Relationship Between Education and Professional Life

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