The predictable journey of outcomes based education

This is a great model for education. The content of the syllabus may be the things of the world, chemicals, forces, processes or historical human events or stories that point to the import of these events in the novel. The syllabus may contain music and painting and architecture. All of these things exist in the world and are proper objects of study. We study them because they all point beyond themselves to the truth.

That truth may be the systematic organisation of all matter in the periodic table of the elements that allow us to produce new compounds and predict what properties they will have. The truth may be about the affairs of men, the great movements of nations or the events of a single life that point to the essence of the human. Thus we have the Father and the Son. Without the mysterious event of learning humanity would be left out of the equation. The Spirit, which blows where it will and which is definitely not under our control completes the Trinity.

This is how modern scepticism and its brother, pragmatism, are overcome by faith in God. We have seen that philosophy based on rationality alone inevitably falls into deep scepticism, the latest post modern version being only the most recent. All philosophy will come to doubt the existence of the world because evidence for that existence is gained through supposedly faulty sense experience, even though we manage to negotiate the world in increasingly sophisticated ways.

Faith in God is not a leap into the dark, another kind of pragmatism, often referred to as a religious crutch; it is rather a rational growing into the name of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This shows both scepticism and pragmatism off with the promise that we will know the truth and the truth will set us free.

Free, that is, from the ideology that is bound to creep into any attempt to sum up a learning outcome.

The other crucial question about our educational crisis is why are our students so passive, so disinterested? Many of them feel the scepticism that has overcome much of culture and they flee into the good feelings evoked by immediate experience. Perhaps this is why they are always plugged into their IPods! If the teacher does not know why English history is important why should the students be interested? School becomes a lot of meaningless hoops that are set before them to jump through. The only carrot offered by our pragmatism is the well healed life that is increasingly shown to be empty.

If we really want to know what is wrong with education then we must look at the hopelessness of contemporary culture.