An education for life

Read through the passage and answer these questions:

1. What are the two traditional reasons for education?

2. What changes might occur in future?

3. What might make it difficult for us to adjust to any changes?

4. What evidence does the writer give to suggest that we will succeed in adjusting?

There is a problem that will touch us all — men, women and children — in the not too distant future, a problem that resolves itself into a question: what is education for? At the moment most of us can answer that fairly practically and without too much soul-searching. On the lowest level education is for enabling us to cope in an adult world where money must be added up, tax forms filled in, numbers looked up in telephone directories, maps read, cur­tains measured and street signs under­stood. On the next level it is for getting some kind of job that will pay a living wage.

But we are already peering into a future so different from anything we would now recognise as familiar that the last of these two educational aims may become as obsolete as a dodo. Basic skills (reading, writing and arithmetic) will continue to be necessary but these, after all, can be taught to children in from one to two years during their childhood. But education with a view to working for a living, at least in the sense of earning daily bread, may well be on its way out right now for the majority of us. Then the question 'what is education for?' becomes much more complex. Because what the future proclaims is: an education is an education is an education.

In other words, our grandchildren may well spend their lives learning as, today, we spend our lives working. This does not simply involve a straightforward substitu­tion of activity but a complete transform­ation of motive. We work for things basically unconnected with that work — usually money, prestige, success, security. We will learn for learning's sake alone: a rose is a rose because it is and not what we can get out of it. Nor need any cynic doubt that we shall not wish to work without there being any obvious end in view. Already, adult education classes are overcrowded - one friend of mine teach­ing French literature says she could have had 10 pupils for every one she has.

Nevertheless, we still live in a very competitive society and most of us will need to reshuffle the furniture of our minds in order to gear our children towards a future in which outer rewards — keeping up with the Joneses – become less relevant than inner and more individ­ual spurs. The existence of competition has always meant doing things because they win us some essentially unconnected advantage but the aim of the future must be to integrate the doing with its own reward, like virtue.

Oddly enough it is in America, that citadel of competitiveness, that the first experiments in this change of mind are taking place. In that New World, there are already organisations set up to exam­ine ways in which competitiveness can be replaced by other inner-directed forms of rewards and pleasures. Take one inter­esting example in a Foundation whose aim is to transform competitive sport. A tug-of-war, as we all know, consists of one team pitting its strength against another team. The aim is to tug the opposing team over a line and, by doing so, win.

In the brand-new non-competitive ver­sion, things are very different. There are still two teams on either end of a rope but now the aim is not to win but to maintain the struggle. As the two teams tug, any individual on either team who senses a coming victory must let go the winning end of the rope and rush over to lend his weight to the other side, thus redressing the balance, and keeping the rug-of-war going as lone as possible. If you actually imagine doing this, the startling fact that emerges is that the new game offers more possibilities of individual judgement and skill just because victory is not the aim and the tug-of-war is ended only by defeat of those judgements and skills. What's more? I think most people would get more pleasure out of the neo-tug than the old winners-take-all concept.

So could it be for learning. Most of us, at some time or another, have glimpsed one of the real inner pleasures of education - a sort of one-person chase after an elusive goal that pits You only against You or, at the very most, against the dis­coveries of the greatest minds of other generations. On a more humble level, most of us have already got some pleasur­able hobby that we enjoy for its own sake and become expert in for that enjoyment. In my own stumbling efforts, since last year, to learn the piano, I have seen the future and it works.

Look at paragraphs 1-5 and find words or phrases which mean the same as:

a can be converted (1) ………...................................

b deep examination of the mind (1) ……………………...............

c manage (1) ……………………...............

d out-of-date (2) ……………………..............

e rearrange(4) ……………………...............

f our ideas(4) ……………………...............

g prepare... for (4) ……………………...............

h competing socially (1) ……………………...............

i motives (4) ……………………...............

j combine (4) ……………………...............

k setting... against (5) ……………………...............

Now complete these statements by choosing the answer which you think fits best.