Pardon my rather idealistic viewpoint. But I somehow envision education to be a process in which students are to be equipped with a certain skillset in order to fulfill their lives to whatever level they deem necessary.
Let’s back up a moment, I am unfamiliar with both the British and American educational system, coming instead from a rather cloistered country of rote learning.
Now when you’re young, you won’t have much of a defined interest or a focused goal in yoru life. This period of youth caries, yes, but still at some point in time. You’re just young. You have no idea what’s good to do, what’s profitable and what in the end will make you a happy and fulfiled person. You’re probably only gonna do what’s cool, like a super spy, or a video game designer or try to crew on the starship enterprise.
The point of education here then, in a broad sense of the word, is to introduce students to the various disciplines that can be studied in depth later. Be it physics, chemistry, history or whatever nonsense the government thinks its necessary. You have to study it for a few years, realize you don’t like it, and then drop it at you grow up, choosing instead to pursue something you’re eally interested in. Like maybe practiing shooting womprats so you can be a ace X-wng pilot or something.
When you get no interest at all in the long run. Whoop dee doo for you. Slack of all you want then. Whatever dude.
That’s the high ideal of course.
Now, the education I come from is not unlike the communist system of being a pragmatic and production focus. Science is emphasized over the humanities, Maths and Biology in particular. Literature and History are taught, yes, but they are usually taught with there being only a few right answers. (you know, the ones that gets the grades, raher than a well thought out, supported, evidencial argument on why you think Iago is secretly gay for Othello, blah blah blah.)
Which brings us back to the origin of this thread. Historical fact and historical lessons. Often, we are told what exactly to think about the historical lessons offered to us. Being repeated told that history is a rote learnign subject just dulls our interest in it. We don’t want to read history and struggle to find what the “right” answer is. We wanna go home, go out, make out, play X-boxes and PS2s, sleep, learn how to speak Klingon, pretend to be wolverine, or beat up that loserish looking kid to seem cool to the others. Who cares about history?
Like mouselock says, if the memorization iof historical fact isn’t the only way to learn how to distinguish between “good” and “bad” choices. Then why study history when you have no interest in it.
Ultimately it boils down to what you can feel fulfilled with. Then the onus is on the student to go out and discover what he is interested in, pursue that.
Suppose someone is fulfilled that he has devoted his life to compiler theory by the age of 80 and feels happy about it, all the best for him. Sure, he might irk the ire of a lot of people who would label him as having tunnel vision.
The point of the education system (or theory or whatever)then is that at least at some point in his life, he was persented with the broad spectrum of disciplines, whatever others out there that he could be interested in outside the field of compiler theory. And maybe, just maybe, make him feel like a more fulfilled person. Just guessing here.
Again, that’s a high ideal.
There’s always that huge gap from understanding it to actually executing it.