What should education do?

 What are the ultimate learning objectives of education? Now that students are having to pay they will be more focussed on getting something out of their university studies rather than studying for pleasure. 

What we all want is a good quality of life. We use education to get to that quality. So it is most often about career as this provides the money and this provides the food, the shelter ... The Experience Designer proposes that education is a response to try and meet the needs of the current society. The problem is that this is not very adaptive and because changing the way we educate takes so long we are always teaching what was needed 10 or 20 years ago and not what is needed now. We try to teach better but employers tell us that graduates are worse and worse and meet their needs less and less.

The other problem with our current education system is how wasteful it is from a Constructivist perspective. Everyone has a unique background. Every has different skills/competencies how ever you want to call them. Also everyone has had different experiences. I was just marking first year students CMS exercises and they too often focus on what they learn in formal education and forget that they learn soft skills in their everyday lives. We are influenced by what we read, what we choose to read, what we watch, who we talk to and all of this is then lost when we try to teach students one way and one set of solutions to a set of questions. Students should be thinking about their studies in the context of their lives and wider experiences but they are not. The ones that do get it - those are the ones who got the high marks for the assignment.