GOOD EDUCATION

What is Good Education?

What is Good Education?

Introduction

The past 20 years have seen a remarkable rise in interest in the measurement of education or, in the lingo of the educational measurement culture, the measurement of educational outcomes. In order to bring issues of value and purpose back into our discussions about education, particularly in situations in which measurement figures prominently. My contention is that a more precise focus on what constitutes good education is crucial for the way we approach all dimensions of education, and particularly for those aspects where we engage most explicitly with questions of values, such as in the fields of assessment, educational evaluation, and in relation to questions about accountability.

Thesis Statement

We need to re-engage with the question as to what constitutes good education, and it is to this that I wish to contribute in this research paper. I will do this in two steps. In the next section, I explore why we seem to have lost sight of questions about values, purpose and the goodness of education. I suggest that at least part of the explanation for this has to do with what I will refer to as the learnification of good education: the transformation of an educational vocabulary into a language of learning. After this, I will present my contribution to the discussion about what constitutes good education.

The Learnification of Good Education

The background of this research lies in the remarkable absence in many contemporary discussions about education of explicit attention for what is educationally desirable. There is much discussion about educational processes and their improvement but very little about what such processes are supposed to bring about. There is very little explicit discussion, in other words, about what constitutes good education (see Fischman et al. 2006; on good educational research). Why might this be so? On the one hand the question of educational purpose might be seen as too difficult to resolve or even as fundamentally irresolvable. This is particularly the case when ideas about the purpose(s) of education are seen as being entirely dependent upon personal - which often means subjective - values and beliefs about which no rational discussion is possible. This often lies behind a dichotomous depiction of views about the aims of education in terms of conservatism versus progressivism or traditional versus liberal. One question is whether such value positions are indeed entirely subjective and thus beyond rational discussion. But even if it may be difficult to reach a resolution, it could be argued that, at least in democratic societies, there ought to be an ongoing discussion about the aims and ends of (public) education - how hard such a discussion might be. (For an interesting account of an attempt by the American Parliament to have such a discussion see Pirrie and Lowden 2004; see also Allen 2003.) What is more though, is that the absence of explicit attention for the aims and ends of education is the effect of often implicit reliance on a particular 'common sense' view of what education ...