User:Phlsph7/Education

Role in society

Education plays various roles in society, including in social, economic, and personal fields. On a social level, education makes it possible to establish and sustain a stable

A further issue is to enable people to become productive members of society by learning how to contribute to it. Through education, individuals acquire the technical and analytical skills needed to pursue their profession, produce goods, and provide services to others. In early societies, there was little specialization and each child would generally learn most of the tasks relevant to help their group. Modern societies are increasingly complex and many professions are only mastered by relatively few individuals who receive specialized training in addition to general education. Some of the skills and tendencies learned to function in society may conflict with each other and their value depends on the context of their usage. For example, fostering a questioning mind is necessary to develop the ability of critical thinking but in some cases, obedience to an authority is required to ensure social stability.^[2][3][4]

By helping people become productive members of society, education can stimulate economic growth and reduce poverty. It helps workers become more skilled and thereby increases the quality of the produced goods and services, which in turn leads to prosperity and increased competitiveness.^[5] In this regard, public education is often understood as a long-term investment to benefit society as a whole. The rate of return is especially high for investments in primary education.^[6][3] Besides increasing economic prosperity, it can also lead to technological and scientific developments as well as decrease unemployment while promoting social equity.^[7]

Education can prepare a country to adapt to changes and successfully face new challenges. For example, it can help raise awareness and contribute to the solution of

Besides intergovernmental organizations, there are also non-governmental international organizations involved, like the International Association of Universities, which promotes the exchange of colleges and universities around the world, and the International Baccalaureate, which offers international diploma programs.^[30][31] Various institutions, like the Erasmus Programme, facilitate student exchanges between different countries.^[32]

Factors of educational success

Many factors influence educational achievement. They include psychological factors, which concern the student as an individual, and sociological factors, which pertain to the student's social environment. Further factors include access to educational technology, teacher quality, and parental involvement. Many of these factors overlap and influence each other.^[33]

Psychological

On a psychological level, relevant factors include motivation, intelligence, and personality.^[34] Motivation is the internal force propelling individuals to engage in learning.^[35][36][37] Motivated students are more likely to interact with the content to be learned by participating in classroom activities like discussions, which often results in a deeper understanding of the subject. It can also help students overcome difficulties and setbacks. An important distinction is between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsically motivated students are driven by an interest in the subject and the learning experience itself while extrinsically motivated students seek external rewards, for example, in the form of good grades and recognition by their peers. It is often claimed that intrinsic motivation is more beneficial by leading to increased creativity and engagement as well as long-term commitment.^[38] Educational psychologists try to discover how to increase motivation, for example, by encouraging a certain level of competition among students or by balancing positive and negative feedback in the form of praise and criticism.^[35][39]

Intelligence is another important factor in how individuals respond to education. It is a

Historically, gender has been a central factor in education since the roles of males and females were defined differently in many societies. Education tended to strongly favor males, who were expected to provide for the family. Females, on the other hand, were expected to manage the household and rear children, which severely hampered the educational opportunities available to them. And while these inequalities have improved in most modern societies, there are still gender differences in education. Among other things, this concerns biases and stereotypes associated with the role of gender in education, like seeing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as male-oriented fields and discouraging female students to follow them.^[53][54][55]

One aspect of many social factors is given by the expectations associated with stereotypes. They work both on an external level, based on how people react to a person belonging to a certain group, and on an internal level, based on how the person internalizes them and acts accordingly. In this sense, the expectations may turn into

Technology plays another significant role in educational success. Educational technology is commonly associated with the use of modern digital devices, like computers. But understood in the broadest sense, it involves a wide range of resources and tools for learning, including basic aids that do not involve the use of machines, like regular books and worksheets.^[58][59]

Educational technology can benefit learning in various ways. In the form of media, it often takes the role of the primary supplier of information in the classroom. This means that the teacher can focus their time and energy on other tasks, like planning the lesson and guiding students as well as assessing educational performance.

A closely related issue concerns the effects of school infrastructure. It includes various physical aspects of the school, like its location and size as well as the available school facilities and equipment. For example, a healthy and safe environment, well-maintained classrooms, and suitable classroom furniture as well as the availability of a library and a canteen tend to contribute to educational success.^[66][67]

The quality of the teacher also has an important impact on educational success. For example, skilled teachers are able to motivate and inspire students and are able to adjust their instructions to the students' abilities and needs. Important in this regard are the teacher's own education and training as well as their past teaching experience.^[68]

An additional factor to boost educational achievement is parental involvement. It can make children more motivated and invested if they are aware that their parents care about their educational efforts. This tends to lead to increased self-esteem, better attendance rates, and more constructive behavior at school. Parent involvement also includes communication with teachers and other school staff, for example, to make other parties aware of current issues and how they may be resolved.^[69][70][71] Further relevant factors sometimes discussed in the academic literature include historical, political, demographic, religious, and legal aspects.^[72][73]

Education studies

The main discipline investigating education is called education studies, also referred to as education sciences. It tries to determine how people transmit and acquire knowledge by studying the methods and forms of education. It is interested in its aims, effects, and value as well as the cultural, societal, governmental, and historical contexts that shape education.[75] Education theorists integrate insights from many other fields of inquiry, including philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics, history, politics, and international relations. Because of these influences, some theorists claim that education studies is not an independent academic discipline like physics or history since its method and subject are not as clearly defined.^[76][77] Education studies differs from regular training programs, such as teacher training, since its focus on academic analysis and critical reflection goes beyond the skills needed to be a good teacher. It is not restricted to the topic of formal education but investigates all forms and aspects of education.^[78][79][80]

Various

Education studies encompasses various subfields like

The economics of education is the field of inquiry studying how education is produced, distributed, and consumed. It tries to determine how resources should be used to improve education. Examples are questions like to what extent the quality of teachers is increased by raising their salary, how smaller class sizes affect educational success, and how to invest in new educational technologies. In this regard, it helps policy-makers decide how to distribute the limited resources most efficiently to benefit society as a whole. It also tries to understand what long-term role education plays for the economy of a country by providing a highly skilled labor force and increasing its competitiveness. A closely related issue concerns the economic advantages and disadvantages of different educational systems.^{[102][103][104]}

Comparative education is the discipline that examines and contrasts educational systems. Comparisons can happen from a general perspective or focus on specific factors, like sociological, political, or economic aspects. It is often applied to different countries to assess the similarities and differences of their educational institutions and practices as well as to evaluate the consequences of the distinct approaches. It can be used to learn from other countries which educational policies work and how one's own educational system may be improved.

The history of education examines the evolution of educational practices, systems, and institutions. It discusses various key processes, their possible causes and effects, and their relations to each other.[112]

Aims and ideologies

A central topic in education studies concerns questions like why people should be educated and what goals should guide this process. Many different

Further aspects of teaching methods include the instructional media used, such as books, worksheets, and audio-visual recordings, and having some form of test or assessment to evaluate the learning progress. An important pedagogical aspect in many forms of modern education is that each particular lesson is part of a larger educational enterprise governed by a syllabus, often covering several months or years.^[91][126] According to Herbartianism, teaching is divided into different phases. The initial phase consists of preparing the student's mind for new information. Next, new ideas are first presented to the learner and then associated with ideas with which the learner is already familiar. In later phases, the understanding shifts to a more general level behind the specific instances and the ideas are then put into concrete practice.^[127][128]

History

The history of education studies the processes, methods, and institutions involved in teaching and learning. It also tries to explain why contemporary education is the way it is, for example, why certain practices and policies are followed while others were discarded.^[129][130] Education began in prehistory, as adults trained the young in the knowledge and skills deemed necessary in their society. For most part, there were no specialized teachers and most adults taught the youth, usually informally during everyday activities. Education was achieved through oral communication and imitation and could take the form of storytelling and singing to pass knowledge, values, and skills from one generation to the next.^[131][132]

The earliest ancient civilizations developed in the period from 3000 to 1500 BCE in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and North China. Ancient education was characterized by the invention of writing and the development of formal education.^[133][134] The invention of writing had a significant influence on the history of education. It made it possible to store and preserve information as well as to make it accessible to more people. This made various subsequent developments possible, for example, the creation of educational tools, like textbooks, and institutions, like schools.^{[135][136][137][58]}

Another key aspect of ancient education was the establishment of formal education. This became necessary since the amount of knowledge grew as civilizations evolved and informal education proved insufficient to transmit all knowledge from one generation to the next. Teachers would act as specialists to impart knowledge and education became more abstract and further removed from daily life. In ancient civilizations, formal education was still quite rare in society and restricted to the intellectual elites. It happened in the form of training scribes and priests and covered various subjects besides reading and writing, including the humanities, science, medicine, mathematics, law, and astrology.

The invention and popularization of the

A side effect of the establishment of public education was the introduction of standardized curricula for public schools as well as standardized tests to assess the students' progress. It also affected teachers by setting in place institutions and norms to guide and oversee teacher training, for example, by establishing certification standards for teaching at public schools.[167]^[168][169]

A further influence on contemporary education are new educational technologies. For example, the widespread availability of computers and the internet dramatically increased access to educational resources and made new types of education possible, such as online education. This was of particular relevance during the

As a neuropsychological process, learning results in various changes to the brain, which can be studied through tools like functional magnetic resonance imaging, for example, by studying what brain areas are primarily involved, how brain activity changes during and after learning as well as how these changes depend on the learned content^{[citation needed]} and the style of learning.^[178][179]

behaviorism example^[180]

constructivism, metacognitive theory, multiple intelligence theory^[181]

funcationalism in education^[182]

In 2019, an estimated 260 million children worldwide did not have access to school education, and social inequality was a major cause.^[183]

The Human Rights Measurement Initiative^[184] measures the right to education for countries around the world, based on their level of income.^[185]

An example is school effectiveness research, which uses statistical methods to identify the factors responsible for the effectiveness of schools. Some of its insights are that tracking student progress and together with positive feedback for accomplishments tends to increase exam results and decrease absence rates among students.^{[186][citation needed]}

A great variety of pedagogical theories is discussed in the academic literature. Mental-discipline theories date back all the way to ancient Greek. They see education as a form of training to help the learner improve their intellectual capacities. They often start from a certain ideal of what educated people should be like and formulate their teaching methods accordingly. Naturalist theories assume that there is already an inborn natural tendency in children to develop in a certain way. The teaching process is then organized in such a manner as to ensure that these tendencies and potentials are fully actualized.^[91][92]

Various

According to the international consortium known as the New London Group, there are four central components to pedagogy. In situated practice, learning takes place by practically engaging in real-life situations. Overt instruction is closer to classical forms of teaching and aims at helping the learner construct new knowledge based on their experiences and pre-existing knowledge. In critical framing, learners reflect on and critically analyze what they learned earlier. Transformed practice involves putting into practice what they learned previously, usually in new contexts and sometimes in the form of teaching others.^[188][189]

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.^[190]

However, the relationship between education and economic growth is not always straight-forward since it may depend on various additional factors. For example, investing resources in education draws them away from other areas where they may be needed. And highly educated individuals may fail to find a job that fits their profession.^[191]

The internationalization of education is sometimes equated by critics with the westernization of education. These critics say that the internationalization of education leads to the erosion of local education systems and indigenous values and norms, which are replaced with Western systems and cultural and ideological values and orientation.^[192]

cultural capital^[193]

For example, Nguyen et al. argue that Western-style group learning is often not an appropriate pedagogical technique in certain countries influences by confucionism, like China, Vietnam, Japan, and Korea.^[108]

Both the aims of education and educational ideologies have an important impact on how to educate. This pertains to issues like who receives education and what contents are taught as well as the methods used to teach them.^{[citation needed]}

, and India, where it stood under the influence of Hindu and Buddhist religious institutions^{[citation needed]}

Maya, Aztecs, and Incas^[194]

India 2nd millennium BCE: Brahmans^[195]

Ancient greeks: Higher education: Sophists, Socrates ^[196]

Ancient Romans^[197]

Europe in the Middle Ages; The development of the universities^[198]

Development of state education^[199]

Education in the 20th century^[200]

technology^[201]

history https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Encyclopedia_Americana_(1920)/Education,_History_of ^{[202] [203]}

Globalization in the form of increased cultural exchange and interconnectedness has had an important impact on the spread of education. In particular, it has led to an internationalization of education. In this regard, many educational institutions cooperate with each other across country boundaries to allow exchanges of both teachers and students.^[176] Other important factors are the development of new communication technologies, like the internet, which has significantly increased the accessibility of knowledge.^[204]

The contemporary importance of public education is also reflected in the fact that many countries invest a significant amount of their gross domestic product into public education.^[153]

Sources

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• Bartlett, Steve; Burton, Diana (2007). Introduction to education studies (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
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• Cohen, Louis; Manion, Lawrence; Morrison, Keith (2018). Research Methods in Education (8th ed.). Routledge.
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• Dufour, Barry; Will, Curtis, eds. (2011). Studying education: an introduction to the key disciplines in education studies. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
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• Murphy, Lisa; Mufti, Emmanuel; Kassem, Derek (2009). Education Studies. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).
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• Ward, Stephen (26 February 2004). Education Studies: A Student's Guide. Routledge.
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• Warren, Sue, ed. (8 May 2009). An Introduction to Education Studies: The Student Guide to Themes and Contexts. Bloomsbury Academic.
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• Bowen, James; Gelpi, Ettore; Anweiler, Oskar. "Education". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 30 April 2023.