Aim of education is to lead the child towards enterprising adulthood

In 2018 the UN General Assembly proclaimed January 24 as the International Day of Education, in celebration of the role of education for peace and development.

This year’s theme is: “Changing course, transforming education.” This theme focuses on the need to nurture transformation to allow access to education for all and help build sustainable futures.

With SA being the most economically unequal country in the world, education can play a huge role towards sustainable solutions to this pernicious challenge. The advent of Covid-19 has also exacerbated the education challenges through its various disruptions to education processes.

According to Unesco director-general, Audrey Azoulay, about 91% of learners missed school during the peak of the pandemic and that reminded everyone of the importance of schools, not just as places of learning.

“Education is a fundamental right and the most powerful aid to development that we have. Defending the future of this right means defending the right to the future,” she said.

In SA, some of the critical challenges facing the school system include poorly performing teachers, poor work ethics, lack of community and parental support, poor control by education authorities, poor support for teachers and very low levels of accountability.

It behoves all education stakeholders to actively and diligently participate to ensure that the ideal of excellent school does not remain a chimera. Failure to address the challenges and crises in education will have a negative effect on other areas of life, including health and social welfare.

Inequality will remain a scourge that will serve as a barrier to the creation of a better life for all. In pondering solutions, the pertinent question should be, what kind of values are envisaged for our children through the education enterprise? Is it excellence over mediocrity? Must diligence prevail over laziness? Is independence worthier than dependence? These values have to be unpacked and made an integral part of teaching and learning endeavours.

The other important question is, what knowledge and skills are relevant in this rapidly-advancing and technologically-driven world? Which qualifications can equip our learners to compete at the global stage? To help answer these questions, the general aim of educational activities should be interrogated.

Aims can be categorised as immediate objectives which refer to what pupils must be able to do at the end of a lesson, intermediate aims, which is about passing a grade and the long-term aim which are of a general nature. Education can be defined as the intentional process of leading the child by the adult towards adulthood.

This definition presupposes that the teacher as the adult leads the child, who is the learner towards the ultimate goal of adulthood.  Adulthood can therefore be considered as being the general aim of education. All immediate objectives, intermediate aims and educative activities should therefore be coherently directed towards realising the attributes of adulthood.

Adulthood is mainly associated with independence which entails, among others, thinking and solving problems independently, revealing the ability, desire and will to be economically independent and to decide independently how to conduct one’s life and to fulfil one’s vocation.

Adulthood also implies freedom and responsibility wherein learners can become free from ignorance, temperamental outbursts and irrational behaviour, from being dependent on others to make personal decisions and choices and to voluntarily accept a set of values and corresponding norms as guidelines for one’s life.

Another attribute of adulthood is that of being acquainted with a personal philosophy of life. This refers to a set of convictions regarding the origin, being and destination of man and the universe. The formation of a personal philosophy of life depends on the educational influence of a variety of socialising agents such as the home, the school, the church, the community, the media, and so on.

Through a philosophy of life, humans are imbued with a sense of right and wrong, which serves as a blueprint for their actions. To actualise the general aim of education, the classroom should serve as the coalface of the interaction between the teacher and the pupil in a qualitative and reciprocal relationship.

The teacher should teach, guide, coach and mentor while the pupil should learn and co-operate to ensure a meaningful interaction that will produce the desired outcome of a rounded pupil with good values, skills and qualifications that will give him or her, the best chance of success in adult life. A complete article would comprise of a pupil with critical thinking and problem-solving skills, aesthetic appreciation, curiosity, creativity, interpersonal skills and so forth.

The centrality of the teacher to the success of any education system can never be overemphasised.

It is only once all teachers start regarding their pupils as their children, thus validating their loco parentis status, that they would start wanting the best for them as they would for their own children. This would dispel the notion that they disregard their duties in the knowledge that their own offspring are ensconced elsewhere where they receive better quality education from more dedicated teachers than themselves.  

Without teacher buy-in into the vision of quality education delivery, all efforts at the implementation of ameliorative measures will be rendered an exercise in futility.