What is Educations purpose?

Week two of Mindlab asks questions around the purpose of education.

What is the purpose?

What drives the purpose?

And how do we know we are creating opportunities for kids to be successful in their education?

We started by discussing an interesting venn diagram on the purpose of education which contained three circles.
1. Education as a means to give qualifications
2. Education as a means to socialise to customs and traditions
3. Education as a means to create subjective thinking (autonomous).
We debated the size of each part and discussed how currently the size of each changes from ECE to Higher education: where socialisation is the focus in ECE and Qualifications the focus of higher education.
We seemed to agree that subjective thinking was taught least in our schools, and that the norms, cultures and traditions our schools are teaching can be very upper, middle class European based. I wondered about the advanced social adaptablility of children these days as they move easily between the culture and traditions of home, to school, to friend groups, to online relationships, multiple family homes etc.


We looked at the 21 century learning Rubrics which cover the 6 important skills that 21st Century education needs to be teaching.
 collaboration
 knowledge construction
 self-regulation
 real-world problem-solving and innovation
 the use of ICT for learning
 skilled communication

Our videos show the steps of success towards achieving each of these skills.

Thanks to Neil, Kersty, Kath - Mindlab Rotorua

Thanks to Vanessa, Shaun, Aimee, Andrea - Mindlab Rotorua

Thanks to Clare, Graham, Brigitte, Liz, Marnel - Mindlab Rotorua


I will have to add the other skills videos created tonight, later, due to uploading issues.