Does education prepare you for life?

My answer to the question of whether education prepares you for life:

I don't really know any more what education is like in British schools but when I went to school we were streamed and much of our work inovolved rote learning. One of the main focuses though in British schools like mine, which, incidentally, was a private girls' school, was on working in teams. We did quite a lot of working in groups, particularly later on in our school career and there was a lot of competition. This was connected to sport but also to academic work. The girls were divided into "colours" and you could get points for your "colour" or lose them :-(( At the end of the year, the colour with the most points won the school cup. This taught us to be highly competitive, which is not necessarily a good thing, but, I suppose it did teach us to work in teams as well. On the whole though, I think we did learn how to work together and we learned a lot of information but there were shortcomings too.

Intellect or wisdom for the children of tomorrow

Modern education sets out with the best will in the world to use all the available resources and teach well, but teaching and learning are often poles apart, and are our education systems doing what we want them to do?

The question of what we are teaching and testing at schools seems to me to be of fundamental importance, but politicians do not always appreciate this or provide the necessary funds where they are needed.
However, the problem goes deeper than that because it is actually a question of our beliefs about what education should be. Is it only a matter of developing cognitive skills and intellectual abilities or should we be teaching our children to be wise?

What is this for?

How to use the Essay Function on Hoot Course

If you click on this side of the page you can write a longer piece of text because, let's face it sometimes 140 characters are simply not enough.
This means that you can use this space to write real pieces of language just as you would on a normal blog.

Twitter-Mosaik by wuestenigel on Flickr

Welcome to the new Blended Learning Blog, which you will be able to use to write your comments and discuss topics with each other, all in English.

This is an image of Twitter that I chose for you because it is symbolic of the ways in which we can use social networking to expand and develop our relationships as well as our knowledge.

I hope you will enjoy using this space for your English.