What Should Our Schools Be Doing?

Hezel, Francis X. (2000-10-30). What Should Our Schools Be Doing?. Micronesian Counselor (Report). Kolonia, Pohnpei: Micronesian Seminar. pp. 1–8.

• Has attachment: File:WSP23QDA.pdf

Abstract: What is education for? What is it supposed to produce? There are dozens of ways of viewing the purpose of education, but in Micronesia today the different responses to this question can be grouped into three general categories:

Manpower training. The main concern of the people espousing this goal is to help the economy take off by providing young people with the skills that will enable them to find employment, no matter how menial; cultural preservation. These people, feeling that the traditional culture is under attack by modern society, think that the first call of education is to turn out individuals who can maintain some continuity with the past; academic skills. The guiding belief here is that education ought to teach people to read and write and think. They feel that only by providing the best and brightest with what they need to get a first-rate education is there hope that some of these will return to lead their nations out of the economic desert.

Before we examine more closely these different views of the purpose of education, we would do well to take a look at where students go when they leave school. There are three streams of young people today flowing to different destinations. Some are returning to the village where they live on the land; some end up in town where they seek whatever employment can be found, and still others go abroad to find work in the US or one of its flag territories such as Guam or Saipan.