Education

[muon2]

The question suffers by lumping all levels and types of eduaction together. The goals of education are necessarily age-dependent. I suspect the Q and A I've seen are dominated by views on high-school age eduaction. I think that is a very narrow slice of one's life in which to consider education.

One goal that is not one the list is to create life-long learners. That means instilling an interest and desire in eduaction. I include an interest in both formal and self-directed education in life-long learning. Our environment is ever-changing, and without life-long learning we are not able to fully adjust to those changes.

I helped write a mission statement for our K-8 schools in the 1990s. It goes as follows:

Our mission is that all students become life-long learners and achieve their maximum potential so that they may participate in and contribute to a democratic society.

[muon2]

Without a common basis of facts and experiences it's hard to engage in any classroom training at all, let alone training a student for independent thought. If you'd like to hire an expert private tutor for each student, perhaps one can have truly individual learning plans. Otherwise, an important goal of early primary eduaction must be to provide students with a firm grounding in a common set of facts that will be the basis of later education. If that means some rote learning in education, I'm for it.

In physics, I expect graduate students to be able to think their way through complex problems, anticipate critical questions, and synthesize methods to test hypotheses. Before I can help guide those graduate students they need a firm foundation of problem solving skills, and examples of basic techniques. Without that they can learn a script, but rarely create new research.

Where do the physics students get that foundation. Of course it comes from earlier education. In college, physics majors will learn a lot of relationships, memorize equations, and repeat time-tested old experiments. To learn at that level, they need a vocabulary of mathematical facts, and the ability to think critically about the world they see around them. That takes them back to earlier education, and a cycle of rote knowledge becoming the basis for deeper understanding.