I'm Learning!

A particularly important passage that I came across while I was working on my masters today:

The idea that goals should be specifiable in advance and that success in teaching consists primarily of bringing about predictable outcomes are themselves what is at issue. Such a set of beliefs, fostered not through an explicit educational rationale but rather embedded in the very techniques that one is encouraged to use, can have significant effects on the way the teacher's role is conceived and what educators believe they are after. Surreptitiously but inexorably, techniques that go unexamined with respect to the ideology that they reflect can be debilitating. Training comes to be substituted for education.

Elliot W. Eisner, The Educational Imagination

The emphasis at the end is mine. This conclusion seems particularly important to me on two distinct levels. First, it refers to the fact that we are training future employees rather than educating future citizens. Secondly (and more importantly, if you ask me), it seems to point out that teachers are no longer being educated in the learning process and their role within it, but instead are being trained to manage a set number of students and move them from predetermined point A to predetermined point B.