Report to the People
Education, Education, Education
The greatest gift any parent can give their child is an education.
Not that your kids believe this, of course. They’re probably of the view that an X-Box or a pony would be a far better expression of your love. But, as you tell them (and yourself) every morning while you’re prising them from their bed with a crow bar, they’ll thank you for caring about their education some day.
And there’s no doubt that most parents do care a great deal about the standard of education their children receive – as the turnout at the National Debate on Education meeting, held in St Patrick’s Primary School last Saturday, showed. Many parents were interested enough to give up their Saturday morning to have their say on the future shape of school education.
As you may already know, the debate will help lay the foundations of a new long term plan for Scottish education. It is looking at questions such as what children should learn, how they should learn it and why they learn in the first place.
But education is about more than schools. We begin learning at birth and continue to learn – or at least should try to – until late in life.
Nowhere was this clearer last week than in Greenock. On the one hand, as you will have read in your Telegraph, Education and Young People Minister, Cathy Jamieson, last Monday opened the new Wellpark Children’s Centre. On the other, I was pleased to attend the award ceremony at James Watt College for students with special needs on Tuesday night.
Seeing in the space of two days both the way children now learn through play at nursery and how students defy obstacles in their way to gain qualifications, underlined to me just how much education has changed – and how wide the concept now is.
Education is far more important today than it was in the days when you could leave school without a single qualification and have no difficulty finding an apprenticeship. And, although rightly still the main aim, education is now about more than putting children into a classroom for 11 or 13 years for no other reason than getting them a job, or a college or university place. Education today is also about releasing the learner’s full potential and developing them as people.
If we teach people how to learn, it can be a habit they take with them through the rest of their lives. Lives in which the possibilities are, if not endless, certainly more plentiful than they otherwise would be.
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