Teachers Without Goals-- Students Without Purpose

Teachers Without Goals Students Without Purpose, by Perkinson (1993) addresses the crisis in education and proposes an alternative construction of education with a renewal of the concepts regarding roles of the teacher and student. The author's educational approach is contrasted with what he labels as modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern approaches.

Perkinson proposes alternatives to teachers viewing their jobs as the promotion of learning. Modernism is seen as reflecting the notion that teachers can transmit knowledge to students by presenting the real world, to be grasped through their senses. Focus is on the packaging of knowledge in a digestible manner, for students. Next it became apparent that levels of development of children needed to be recognized, so that a child's ability to receive knowledge would be acknowledged. The theory of evolution furthered the learning concept to include the notion that learning is a matter of solving problems in the pursuit of goals; therefore students discover rather than receive knowledge. Teachers now needed to provide problems related to developmental levels, for the student to discover the knowledge the teacher wanted him to learn. An alternative to these notions is that knowledge comes from within rather than without. Perkinson suggests that education be considered as the growth or evolution of knowledge.

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close their present level of proficiency. The coach is accepting rather than judgmental and censorious. The student then learns skills through a continual trial-and-error elimination; it is proposed that students do not learn skills by being shown the correct way or through repetition. A critical environment helps the student recognize mistakes, errors, and inadequacies in performance; the teacher-coach becomes a critic. Recognition of the consequences of doing wrong, is an effective way to help the student see inadequacies in skills. A supportive environment provides security and confidence for the students; they do not feel threatened or anxious. Since criticism can cause anxiety, critical feedback needs to take place with support. The teacher needs to separate the student from his performance and encourage and praise the student's capacity to do better. Arguments against postmodernism include the concept of knowledge without justification. Teachers with goals are viewed as having a justificatory theory of rationality which accepts only that knowledge which is justified as true. Since it is impossible to justify knowledge, modern teachers appeal to an ultimate authority such as an expert, or science. The authority is
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Approximate Word count = 1456
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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