AIMS and PURPOSES in EDUCATION

JOEY R. MIÑANO

EDUCATIONAL AIMS

Educational Aims Performs 3 Important Functions (Normative)

1. Give direction to the educative process.• before one makes a change in the curriculum or

plans a new school building or adds new personnel to the staff, he must ask what his objectives are. It is worthwhile to be conscious of what direction, custom and tradition are carrying the educative process.

2. Aims not only should give direction to education but should motivate it as well.

• Aims are values, and if they are valued, if they are wanted, they should induce the learner to release the energies necessary to accomplish them.

3. Aims have the function of providing a criterion for evaluating the educational process

• Whether one is examining students or accrediting high schools and colleges, he must have reference to initial objectives.

HOW AIMS FUNCTION

Act purposely, to consider future events in the light of the past, all one acting intelligently…• to distinguish aims or objectives from

outcomes or results. The former are a matter of foresight, while the latter are the matter of hindsight. The former are what one tries to learn or teach; while the latter what actually succeeds in learning or teaching.

Reshaped to meet the needs of a dynamic environment• that educational aims

should emerge from experience. It is not only purposeful but personal.

Serve the educative process• that education must be a judicious

mixture of a participation in present life and preparation for subsequent events.

• education should properly put more stress on preparation for adulthood than on a present interests of childhood.

• education and college should aim at life, life here and now, emerges from the past and imperceptibly merges with the future.

The PROXIMATE AIMS OF EDUCATION

Aims must be tailor-made for the occasion• aims arise out of concrete situations in

which the people are involved.

Enumeration of Educational Values should be fairly complete and satisfactory.

1. The Ultimate quest for perfection

Literally the last and final end of education

…Religious view of the world: to teach the child how to act, and has the lives of Jesus and the saints to instate, this would be the concrete embodiment of the aim.

Various Values Consisting the Ultimate Aim of Education

Bible: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect”

2. Self-Realization: a more definite character by declaring that the chief and ultimate end of education is the Cultivation of Intellect, this should not be confused with Self-expression.

Man lives among his fellows: it is a matter of balanced participation in the institution of the society.

Human nature should examine, see what is its potentialities, and then set up an Educational program which aims to actualize or realize them.

Rousseau’s Idea: education should aim to perfect the individual in all his powers “the object of education is not to make a soldier, magistrate, or priest, but to make an educated man”.

…formal discipline of the mind – intellectual excellence does not so much consists in the pursuit of knowledge on its own account.

3. Ultimate growth: the ultimate aim of education is not just physically but in greater insight into and control over one’s environment.

John Dewey: “The educational process has no end beyond itself; is its own end”.

Aims and Purposes in EducationPhilosophical view

An aim is a logical prerequisite of a practical theory.Unless some end is regarded as valuable no practical theory is possible.

A practical theory consists simply of an argument providing recommendations for achieving some end thought desirable.

Practice is always theory-loaded.

Distinction between an aim and a purpose

Someone who is engaged in a practical task

What are you doing? What are you doing it for?

someone is being asked to specify what his action is, to

state its content

to presuppose some end outside the activity itself, which the

activity is designed and intended to bring about

What are you digging that piece of ground

for?

Purpose

So that I can grow potatoes in it

I am digging over this piece of

ground thoroughly

Aim

Purpose• The answer is given in instrumental terms, one thing

being done in order to achieve another, the end product lying outside the activity itself. ‘Purposes’ point to ends external to an activity.

Aim• The answer does not refer to any external end, it merely

makes clear what is being done.

To talk of purposes is always to refer to some external end to which the activity is directed, to talk of aims is not to refer to external ends but

to the activity itself, to its internal end.

Relevance in Education

A teacher maybe asked to state his aim in a particular lesson, that is to make clear what he is doing or trying to do.

He may also be asked what is really a separate question, namely, why he is doing it, what he is doing it for, what his purpose is in trying to get his pupils to write poetry or to solve quadratic equations.

So too, it is possible to ask of education itself, what its aims are and what its purpose maybe.

Educational Aims

The aim of education, as has already been suggested, is to produce an educated man, one who meets the various criteria of intellectual, moral and aesthetic development.

Subordinate aims of education: the development of literary awareness, or the giving of an appreciation of scientific or mathematical modes of thinking, but taken all together these various subordinate aims coalesce in the overall end of making a certain kind of person.

To ask the aim of education is to conceive of education as an end in itself, something intrinsically good, involving the development of a person.

Educational Purposes

The purpose of education, it might be said, is to increase the number of literate, knowledgeable citizens, or to produce sufficient numbers of doctors, lawyers, civil servants, engineers and the like.

Here the reference is to valuable ends which lies outside the actual practice of education, social, political or economic ends.

To ask the purpose or purposes of education is to think of it as a device designed to bring about external goods, skilled workers, executive, and professionals.

Summary

Aims

It is because of this distinction that it is often said that the aims of education are internal and that it is inappropriate to ask for an aim which lies outside education itself.

Purpose

Education, it may be thought, being an end to itself should not be regarded in terms of purpose. But it makes good sense to ask: Why do we want well-developed, sensitive, intellectually equipped, useful people?

Aims and Purpose

The educated man needs also to be a good citizen, a good worker, a good colleague, and being educated man may be, indeed should be, a great help in achieving these worthwhile external ends. Education has important purposes as well as important aims.

Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.

You are all learners, doers, teachers. Richard Bach

Thank you very much