Development goals[edit]
Since 1909, the ratio of children in the developing world going to school has increased. Before then, a small minority of boys attended school. By the start of the 21st century, the majority of all children in most regions of the world attended school. There are 73 million children,[clarification needed] mostly female children in poor families, who did not start elementary school. There are more than 200 million children, mostly females from poor families, who did not go to secondary school.[24] Universal Primary Education is one of the eight international Millennium Development Goals, towards which progress has been made in the past decade, though barriers still remain.[25] Securing charitable funding from prospective donors is one particularly persistent problem. Researchers at the Overseas Development Institute have indicated that the main obstacles to receiving more funding for education include conflicting donor priorities, an immature aid architecture, and a lack of evidence and advocacy for the issue.[25] Additionally, Transparency Internationalhas identified corruption in the education sector as a major stumbling block to achieving Universal Primary Education in Africa.[26] Furthermore, demand in the developing world for improved educational access is not as high as foreigners have expected. Indigenous governments are reluctant to take on the recurrent costs involved. There is economic pressure from those parents who prefer their children to earn money in the short term rather than work towards the long-term benefits of education.[citation needed]
A study conducted by the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning indicates that stronger capacities in educational planning and management may have an important spill-over effect on the system as a whole.[27] Sustainable capacity development requires complex interventions at the institutional, organizational and individual levels that could be based on some foundational principles:
- national leadership and ownership should be the touchstone of any intervention;
- strategies must be context relevant and context specific;[clarification needed]
- they should embrace an integrated set of complementary interventions, though implementation may need to proceed in steps;[clarification needed]
- partners should commit to a long-term investment in capacity development, while working towards some short-term achievements;
- outside intervention should be conditional on an impact assessment of national capacities at various levels.
- Removal of a certain percentage of students for improvisation of academics (usually practiced in schools, after 10th grade)
Internationalization[edit]
Nearly every country now has Universal Primary Education.
Similarities — in systems or even in ideas — that schools share internationally have led to an increase in international student exchanges. The European Socrates-Erasmus Program[28]facilitates exchanges across European universities. The Soros Foundation[29] provides many opportunities for students from central Asia and eastern Europe. Programs such as the International Baccalaureate have contributed to the internationalization of education. The global campus online, led by American universities, allows free access to class materials and lecture files recorded during the actual classes.
Education and technology in developing countries[edit]
Technology plays an increasingly significant role in improving access to education for people living in impoverished areas and developing countries. There are charities dedicated to providing infrastructures through which the disadvantaged may access educational materials, for example, the One Laptop per Child project.
The OLPC foundation, a group out of MIT Media Lab and supported by several major corporations, has a stated mission to develop a $100 laptop for delivering educational software. The laptops were widely available as of 2008. They are sold at cost or given away based on donations.
In Africa, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) has launched an "e-school program" to provide all 600,000 primary and high schools with computer equipment, learning materials and internet access within 10 years.[30] An International Development Agency project called nabuur.com,[31] started with the support of former American President Bill Clinton, uses the Internet to allow co-operation by individuals on issues of social development.
India is developing technologies that will bypass land-based telephone and Internet infrastructure to deliver distance learning directly to its students. In 2004, the Indian Space Research Organization launched EDUSAT, a communications satellite providing access to educational materials that can reach more of the country's population at a greatly reduced cost.[32]
Private v public funding in developing countries[edit]
Research into low cost private schools found that over 5 years to July 2013, debate around low-cost private schools to achieving Education for All (EFA) objectives was polarised and finding growing coverage in international policy.[33] The polarisation was due to disputes around whether the schools are affordable for the poor, reaching disadvantaged groups, provide quality education, supporting or undermining equality, and are financially sustainable. The report examined the main challenges that development organisations which support LCPSs have encountered.[33] Surveys suggest these types of schools are expanding across Africa and Asia and is attributed to excess demand. These surveys also found concern for:
- Equity, widely found in the literature, as the growth in low-cost private schooling may be exacerbating or perpetuating already existing inequalities in developing countries, between urban and rural populations, lower- and higher-income families, and between girls and boys The report says findings are that LCPSs see evidence girls are underrepresented and that they are reaching some low-income families, often in small numbers compared with higher-income families.
- Quality of provision and educational outcomes, you cannot generalise about the quality of private schools, while most achieve better results than government counterparts, even after their social background is taken into account, some studies find the opposite. Quality in terms of levels of teacher absence, teaching activity and pupil to teacher ratios in some countries are better in LCPSs than in government schools.
- Choice and affordability for the poor: parents can choose private schools because of perceptions of better-quality teaching and facilities, and an English language instruction preference. Nevertheless, the concept of ‘choice’ does not apply in all contexts, or to all groups in society, partly because of limited affordability (which excludes most of the poorest) and other forms of exclusion, related to caste or social status.
- Cost-effectiveness and financial sustainability: Evidence is that private schools operate at low cost by keeping teacher salaries low, but their financial situation may be precarious where they are reliant on fees from low-income households.
The report said there were some cases of successful voucher and subsidy programmes, evaluations of international support to the sector are not widespread.[33] Addressing regulatory ineffectiveness is a key challenge. Emerging approaches stress the importance of understanding the political economy of the market for LCPSs, specifically how relationships of power and accountability between users, government and private providers can produce better education outcomes for the poor.
Educational theory[edit]
Main article: Educational theory
Purpose of schools[edit]
Individual purposes for pursuing education can vary. The understanding of the goals and means of educational socialization processes may also differ according to the sociological paradigm used.
In the early years of schooling, the focus is generally around developing basic Interpersonal communication and literacy skills in order to further ability to learn more complex skills and subjects. After acquiring these basic abilities, education is commonly focused towards individuals gaining necessary knowledge and skills to improve ability to create value and a livelihood for themselves.[35] Satisfying personal curiosities (Education for the sake of itself) and desire for personal development, to "better oneself" without career based reasons for doing so are also common reasons why people pursue education and use schools.[36]
Education is often understood to be a means of overcoming handicaps, achieving greater equality and acquiring wealth and status for all (Sargent 1994). Learners can also be motivated by their interest in the subject area or specific skill they are trying to learn. Learner-responsibility education models are driven by the interest of the learner in the topic to be studied.[37]
Education is often perceived as a place where children can develop according to their unique needs and potentialities[38] with the purpose of developing every individual to their full potential.
Educational psychology[edit]
Main article: Educational psychology
Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of educational interventions, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schoolsas organizations. Although the terms "educational psychology" and "school psychology" are often used interchangeably, researchers and theorists are likely to be identified as educational psychologists, whereas practitioners in schools or school-related settings are identified as school psychologists. Educational psychology is concerned with the processes of educational attainment in the general population and in sub-populations such as gifted children and those with specific disabilities.
Educational psychology can in part be understood through its relationship with other disciplines. It is informed primarily by psychology, bearing a relationship to that discipline analogous to the relationship between medicine and biology. Educational psychology in turn informs a wide range of specialties within educational studies, including instructional design, educational technology, curriculum development, organizational learning, special education and classroom management. Educational psychology both draws from and contributes to cognitive science and the learning sciences. In universities, departments of educational psychology are usually housed within faculties of education, possibly accounting for the lack of representation of educational psychology content in introductory psychology textbooks (Lucas, Blazek, & Raley, 2006).
Learning modalities[edit]
There has been much interest in learning modalities and styles over the last two decades. The most commonly employed learning modalities are:[39]
- Visual: learning based on observation and seeing what is being learned.
- Auditory: learning based on listening to instructions/information.
- Kinesthetic: learning based on movement, e.g. hands-on work and engaging in activities.
Other commonly employed modalities include musical, interpersonal, verbal, logical, and intrapersonal.
Dunn and Dunn[40] focused on identifying relevant stimuli that may influence learning and manipulating the school environment, at about the same time as Joseph Renzulli[41] recommended varying teaching strategies. Howard Gardner[42] identified a wide range of modalities in his Multiple Intelligences theories. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Keirsey Temperament Sorter, based on the works of Jung,[43] focus on understanding how people's personality affects the way they interact personally, and how this affects the way individuals respond to each other within the learning environment. The work of David Kolb and Anthony Gregorc's Type Delineator[44] follows a similar but more simplified approach.
Some theories propose that all individuals benefit from a variety of learning modalities, while others suggest that individuals may have preferred learning styles, learning more easily through visual or kinesthetic experiences.[45] A consequence of the latter theory is that effective teaching should present a variety of teaching methods which cover all three learning modalities so that different students have equal opportunities to learn in a way that is effective for them.[46] Guy Claxton has questioned the extent that learning styles such as VAK are helpful, particularly as they can have a tendency to label children and therefore restrict learning.[47][48] Recent research has argued "there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice."[49]
Philosophy[edit]
Main article: Philosophy of education
As an academic field, philosophy of education is "the philosophical study of education and its problems (...) its central subject matter is education, and its methods are those of philosophy".[50] "The philosophy of education may be either the philosophy of the process of education or the philosophy of the discipline of education. That is, it may be part of the discipline in the sense of being concerned with the aims, forms, methods, or results of the process of educating or being educated; or it may be metadisciplinary in the sense of being concerned with the concepts, aims, and methods of the discipline."[51] As such, it is both part of the field of education and a field of applied philosophy, drawing from fields of metaphysics, epistemology,axiology and the philosophical approaches (speculative, prescriptive, and/or analytic) to address questions in and about pedagogy, education policy, andcurriculum, as well as the process of learning, to name a few.[52] For example, it might study what constitutes upbringing and education, the values and norms revealed through upbringing and educational practices, the limits and legitimization of education as an academic discipline, and the relation between education theory and practice.
Curriculum[edit]
In formal education, a curriculum is the set of courses and their content offered at a school or university. As an idea, curriculum stems from the Latinword for race course, referring to the course of deeds and experiences through which children grow to become mature adults. A curriculum is prescriptive, and is based on a more general syllabus which merely specifies what topics must be understood and to what level to achieve a particular grade or standard.
An academic discipline is a branch of knowledge which is formally taught, either at the university–or via some other such method. Each discipline usually has several sub-disciplines or branches, and distinguishing lines are often both arbitrary and ambiguous. Examples of broad areas of academic disciplines include the natural sciences, mathematics, computer science, social sciences, humanities and applied sciences.[53]
Educational institutions may incorporate fine arts as part of K-12 grade curricula or within majors at colleges and universities as electives. The various types of fine arts are music, dance, and theater.[54]
Instruction[edit]
Instruction is the facilitation of another's learning. Instructors in primary and secondary institutions are often called teachers, and they direct the education of students and might draw on many subjects like reading, writing, mathematics, science and history. Instructors in post-secondary institutions might be called teachers, instructors, or professors, depending on the type of institution; and they primarily teach only their specific discipline. Studies from the United States suggest that the quality of teachers is the single most important factor affecting student performance, and that countries which score highly on international tests have multiple policies in place to ensure that the teachers they employ are as effective as possible.[55][56] With the passing of NCLB in the United States (No Child Left Behind), teachers must be highly qualified. A popular way to gauge teaching performance is to use student evaluations of teachers (SETS), but these evaluations have been criticized for being counterproductive to learning and inaccurate due to student bias.[37]
Economics[edit]
Main article: Economics of education
It has been argued that high rates of education are essential for countries to be able to achieve high levels of economic growth.[57] Empirical analyses tend to support the theoretical prediction that poor countries should grow faster than rich countries because they can adopt cutting edge technologies already tried and tested by rich countries. However, technology transfer requires knowledgeable managers and engineers who are able to operate new machines or production practices borrowed from the leader in order to close the gap through imitation. Therefore, a country's ability to learn from the leader is a function of its stock of "human capital". Recent study of the determinants of aggregate economic growth have stressed the importance of fundamental economic institutions[58] and the role of cognitive skills.[59]
At the individual level, there is a large literature, generally related to the work of Jacob Mincer,[60] on how earnings are related to the schooling and other human capital of the individual. This work has motivated a large number of studies, but is also controversial. The chief controversies revolve around how to interpret the impact of schooling.[61][62] Some students who have indicated a high potential for learning, by testing with a high intelligence quotient, may not achieve their full academic potential, due to financial difficulties.[citation needed]
Economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis argued in 1976 that there was a fundamental conflict in American schooling between the egalitarian goal of democratic participation and the inequalities implied by the continued profitability of capitalist production on the other.[63]
