Education is seen by many as something that has to be put in the minds of the learners. In this case children are fed with knowledge that they do not require at all. What a learner needs in education is totally different from the educational perspectives of the educators. Every human being has something latent in his heart. A person is born with some knowledge that should be extracted through education. Education therefore should focus on extracting this special knowledge that is present and unique in every individual.
This is evident from the ‘Meno’ dialogue whereby Socrates experimented with a slave boy who had never been to school and he proved to observers that the boy knew geometry. The boy knew geometry not through education, but because he had the principles of geometry in his mind and was anxious about it. This knowledge was only waiting to be drawn out through education. However this is usually not the case with educators. (Jacob, 1997 pp. 106-123) Educators aim at stuffing information in the minds of the learner through the process of education. Students are not given the chance to learn at all.
The students may find themselves spending valuable time studying on the materials stuffed in their minds by the teachers. The teachers are focused at feeding the students with what they believe is important to the students. The education curriculum is the point of reference for the teachers while providing education to the children. The different ideologies about education are focused on the teacher as the sole source of education. This idea is totally diverse from reality. The teachers are equipped with necessary information that they are supposed to use in eliciting knowledge from the minds of the learners.
However they stuff the students with this information as they are entrusted educators. The children are innocent and follow what they are instructed to do. Stuffing of the children can be destructive to the inner knowledge that the child possesses. The pearls inside each human being are important in his development both socially and academically. For education to have useful meaning, apart from providing learners with junk information, it must draw out from the child what is concealed in every person that is, the rules of reason. This inner knowledge is crucial in proper making of a person.
Teachers should not take children as empty sausages that need to be stuffed and sealed up. The role of the teacher should mainly be aimed at helping the pupils open up their loaded minds and reveal the riches deep within these tender minds. The knowledge should be natured with a lot of passion and persistence. The efforts for developing a sound education model which concentrates on the inner knowledge of the child is the learner centered education model. Education activities and projects that are learner centered should be developed around basic changes in pedagogy and encouraging new ways of understanding learners.
The only way out to help learners at all levels be it in elementary education or in higher education, is to understand the basic principles of knowledge that has been misinterpreted over the years by educators. Teachers and other educators must in all ways refocus their mode of instruction in order to improve education based on the idea that children posses special in born knowledge that require to be drawn out for education to be effective.
Work cited
page Klein, Jacob. A Commentary on Plato’s Meno. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.