Paideia Proposal
Paideia is a word that is being used for education in Greek. Paideia means (in ancient Greece) a system of broad cultural education.Paideia Proposal was an Educational Strategy signed in 1982 by Mortimer Adler. It was designed on behalf of Paideia Group. It is a K-12 educational reform strategy.
Paideia proposal is basically an arrangement of liberal education for all the people. It was a one-track system of schooling proposed by Paideia group. This was proposed that by neglecting the students as individuals and their different home environments, education should be provided equally to everyone.
According to this proposal, preschool to 12 years of education are the most important educational years. Basic schooling must therefore be made available to all children. Introduction of the Socratic Method alongside the didactic and skills instruction modes of teaching are the only way of understanding basic thoughts and morals.
Purpose:
Students after getting proper education should be capable of:
- Earn a living in an intelligent and responsible way.
- Performing a role as bright and accountable citizens.
- Making both of these things to help the purpose of leading intellectual and liable lives.
- Educate all American schoolchildren so that they can earn good money, enjoy full survives, and donate to a self-governing society.
Threefold Objective:
- All individuals are given the same educational opportunity, and must therefore make the most of it.
- Basic schooling must aim at turning the students into responsible citizens committed towards the betterment of the society.
- Basic schooling must prepare children to earn a living when they are grown up.
Achievement of the Objectives:
To achieve these three objectives, the character of basic schooling must be general and liberal.
Lifelong Learning:
- According to Adler, is to prepare children for a lifelong process of learning.
- Schools must encourage children to continue their education even after their formal schooling ends.
Final Objective:
After the age 60, an individual (who engaged in the lifelong learning process) is expected to be fully mature & experienced, & is thus ready to make & defend solutions to life’s major problems, or to acknowledge existence of problems with no satisfactory solutions.
Arguments with logical examples
Mr. Adler and his coworker proposed single-track core program which claims that same things are learnt in schools by students. For example, it is expected that all students should know calculus. My first question is that can all students learn and become expert in same subjects? Many professors and educators try to do that almost all children can be expected to acquire certain knowledge and skills and to demonstrate reasonably high levels of achievement.
Students’ interest is a major thing that cannot be neglected and high level attention and emphasis are required to make students capable to understand the subject. Sadly, many teachers are unaware of many things mentioned in Paideia proposal for student to lean. It is also to be noted that most of the intelligent students are unable to apply calculus to solve the problem if they depend on it. Some of us are in corporeal hazard. Purpose of Paideia proposal was that everything should be learnt by everyone. But everyone has not the same mind and interests.
Second problem with the suggestion of main program is that all students learn in the same way. What students can learn even if they have similar intellectual skills then, question is what they want to learn? They have differences in acquiring knowledge, to understand procedures and assimilate information.
These differences of interest and learning styles are exaggerated not only by what is going on in schools, but also by differences in heredity, home environment and community. For Example, you assign a topic to students to learn in 10 minutes and few of them will learn quickly, few will learn half topic and others have not understand the topic yet because they cannot make their concept quickly or the topic is not of their interest so that they cannot concentrate.
Third, the Paideia group has emphasized upon core curriculum that making extra reputation towards what one learns than to the attainment of an ability to learn and a love of learning. In a society where the average person may change occupations five times and where the ability to use new information may be the most important determinant of success, our concept of what it means to be an educated person will need to change. It will be more important to be a learner than to be learned.
In dealing with the teaching and learning process, the Paideia proposal imagines that one can divide the things to be learned into three classes and for each of these a particular pedagogical approach is most appropriate. No evidence is offered to support this important assertion. Research on effective teaching suggests that good teachers have a broad repertoire of teaching skills and that while teaching a given subject the teachers easily move from one to another in meeting the needs of their students.
Those who study how children learn will be surprised to find that lectures and description are strongly recommended teaching styles and that the group advocates “coaching” as the major way to ensure that children develop their intellectual skills.
To accept fully the argument of the Paideia group, educators would need to overlook much of the recent research on effective teaching and effective schools because that research directs the quest better education to concerns largely unaddressed in the proposal.
