The Purpose of Education

Is education most commonly treated purely as an instrumental tool (e.g. to get a job), or as a path to self-development, or both? How can a balance between objectives be achieved in public education?

Preface: This is a discussion paper, not a researched academic document. The reading list at the end is mostly a collection of contemporary links from the Internet and pretty accidental, not edited for quality. Where a topic is of broad general interest comes up with friends, I have adopted the practice of posting discussion starters like the present one on Academia.edu in the hope that others might also find them worth thinking about. In spite of the caveats, this particular topic has been important to my working life, so the observations to follow are not merely casual.

1. The purpose of education – a ubiquitous theme with an infinity of meanings

Any Internet search will reveal a myriad of articles and blogs on this topic. This is not surprising since formal education of some kind affects every family and every individual in almost every country. Informal education has probably affected just about everyone since humans evolved. What the online material does show is that while the process is universal, the objectives are diverse and often in conflict. Indeed much of the discussion seems to be at cross purposes. I have been a teacher, mostly to young adults, for 35 years in seven countries with quite different cultures, so I am deeply familiar with the currents of intention and counter-intention which touch everyone in the enterprise of education. My own doctoral dissertation was an analysis of 20 case studies in institutions where the publicly expressed purposes of education were often sabotaged. Although I have seen some of the failures, the institutional reasons for such failures are so embedded and so internationally widespread that I can see little direct hope for major changes. What I do see is that for technological and cultural reasons, the relationships between public mass education and personal self-education are changing drastically. The outcomes of that melding are still unclear, but the process offers hope.

For my own use, I have a fairly succinct idea of the most hopeful purpose of education, and how to realize it:

3. The purpose of education – a transmission of cultures between generations?

Apparently missing from the my own paradigm of education is the age old purpose of organized education, even going back to traditional tribal societies, the function of passing on the culture to the next generation. However this transfer of culture – culture here in the most inclusive sense – is something that will emerge in the process of questioning systematically. In fact, with our cultural tools changing at galactic warp speed, intense questioning (as opposed to a passive reception old authority) is the only way to stay ahead of the game. Mass education worldwide has quite clearly failed for most people to meet my cluster of proposed objectives. This is not surprising. Although attractive discussion points, a-f have rarely been the applied objectives of mass education amongst politicians, administrators, teachers or students. On the plus side, it also remains true that mass education, for all of its many limitations, has in aggregate equipped people all over the world in ways that are infinitely superior to those who have received no systematic education at all.

4. The purpose of education – its translation into actual motivation for most of the players

Now what is the actual purpose of formal education as understood by majority of players over the age of puberty? Well, the actual purpose for these people is economic. They seek to become employable, industrially productive, and hence socially decent consumers. The translation of these economic objectives to personal value systems is that people often see education as a way to secure their personal status. Status is not a small thing, and in some societies may be an explicit precondition for, say, obtaining a suitable marriage partner.

The economic pitch is what we hear from politicians who are arranging the funding, the administrators who are setting curriculums, and for that matter from the majority of students. In fact students everywhere complain in their later careers that “what I learned at school was useless. I never use any of that stuff”. That is, for them, certified graduation from a respected institution is far more important than the substance of any knowledge or skill building they encountered. Not surprisingly, rent seeking from the diploma game is a vast worldwide undertaking, rife with fraud and empty marketing. I have documented a certain amount of this in my doctoral dissertation, and some of my papers referenced below.

5. The purpose of education – some query the objectives of economic rationalism

From all of the stakeholders in the educational process, it is a small number of professional teachers (out of battalions of uncritical teachers and lecturers) who are apt to be a bit quizzical about the “employability” mantra. They understand as well as anyone that employment is a useful, a necessary objective. They worry though that learning to shoe horses (to use a metaphor) is a narrow skill, not necessarily transferrable when horses are replaced by horseless carriages, cars. They see that even students with very ordinary potentials will probably be expected in their lifetimes to survive many job transitions, probably into new industries, and that the ones who prosper are likely to have flexible minds and a wider knowledge base, adaptable enough to make smart judgements in environments which can’t be predicted. Both the universe of ideas and the universe of things are rushing into vortices that are beyond average conception, let alone an evaluation of consequences for “career planning” (Gillespie 2014). So few even grasp the trajectory of where we have come from. My ninety-two year old mother didn’t see a light switch until she was twelve. Alert teachers also ask whether we live to work, or work to live, and whether having decided to live a little, we realize that living benefits from knowledge which goes somewhat beyond the skill of shoeing horses.

The depth of contradiction between the stated role of educational institutions as places of learning, and their most common function as diploma and marketing mills, is so great and so pervasive that real reform is not a simple option. The easy response is a retreat to cynicism or conspiracies of self-delusion amongst those with a vested interest in the game. I do not have instant solutions. However, what my doctoral dissertation attempted to do (with many flaws) was to introduce the notion of competing productivities.

Productivity is a concept often hijacked with fancy formulae by economists to fit their favourite models. However, to go back to the everyday meaning of productivity, it is about getting the best results in the most efficient way. A productive student is one who efficiently learns and retains what she seeks to learn. A productive teacher is one who maximizes the learning of his students.

However, everyone has a personal agenda. The personal agenda of an educational director may tell him that his own most productive activity is to maximize his bonus and prospects of promotion. That may very well entail imposing extremely unproductive requirements on teachers and students. In fact, I documented this process in 20 case studies across seven countries. The daily reality is that in institutions management may have relative permanence, while teachers are often regarded as day labourers by managers, with those managers having little commitment to optimizing student learning. The power pyramid is clear. Students come and go. Therefore students have the least power. The upshot is that the “productivity” of personal agendas amongst administrators and their political masters tends to hugely outrank the learning productivity of students and their mentors, the teachers. The hierarchy of competing productivities exactly inverts the stated role of educational institutions. We can begin by making this inversion explicit, widely known and understood. Then we need to find ways to properly implement a hierarchy of learning productivities.

A reconstructed hierarchy of productivities would genuinely empower teachers to exercise decisive professional judgement both in maximizing the learning productivity of their students and establishing their influence over the administrative and ‘managerial’ support staff who in most current institutions outrank them when it comes down to hard choices. By the term “teacher”, here we refer to the whole zoo of personnel titles applied to those who directly influence the learning of students – tutors, teachers, coaches, trainers, lecturers, professors, and so on.

It is true that large numbers of the current cohort of teachers would have trouble handling an elevated level of professional responsibility. They have long been socialized into more subordinate roles. Even with the best of intentions, training and experience teachers will continue to fall into a range of capabilities. It is just that those capabilities will surely be more realistically targeted to student productivity than existing managerial regimes are likely to comprehend.

Every profession has brilliant high fliers, those who just get by, and a group who are a danger to everyone around them. Every profession has strict interpretationists – black letter lawyers, fundamentalist priests, inflexible policemen, non-intuitive motor mechanics, teachers who never deviate from the assigned textbook. Every profession has creative interpretationists – judges who look for the intention behind the law, priests who grasp the psychological needs of their parishioners, policemen who know when a stern warning grows a better teenager than a month in prison, wizard motor mechanics who can intuit the heartbeat of an engine, teachers with the gift of creating teachable moments.

In no collection of human beings can we ever suppress for long the variety of human psychological types. Ideologies, religions, training regimes, are eventually powerless to homogenize humanity. The history of the last 6000 years is crystal clear about this. And why would we want a dreary population of robots anyway? So when it comes to setting up a system, say an education system, we have to expect the bad with the good. What can be done is to think honestly about the priorities of the enterprise – learning productivity in an educational institution – and arrange the incentives to optimize outcomes. We have to make it easy to be good, where good, if it is a school, means effective long term learning and graduated students who are equipped and motivated to continue learning. Making it easy to be good means that the school accountant, and the janitor, and the heads of department, and the teachers, as well as the students, have their secret personal agendas best satisfied by also contributing to a healthy learning environment.

8. The State of Play – how well do the existing graduates of mass education systems seem to be coping?

There is no easy or simple answer to this query. Coping with what? Plainly people get by from day to day, for better or for worse, in endless ways. The “success” of their coping depends upon what they value, what they are aware of, and how fortunately (or not) their particular environment impacts upon them. When it comes to making use of other people, or offering them a service, or depending upon them as consumers or whatever, each interested party will have an opinion. That external opinion may loom large in the fortunes of the supposedly ‘educated person’ or it may be regarded as trivial. All of this is to say that evaluating the outcomes of any educational process is always conditional, not absolute. The evaluation always exists in the context of an ideology, or a particular vested interest.

When we express our own opinions about educational processes, we are usually assessing the situation according to our own interests and prejudices. That is OK, so long as we can accept that our viewpoint cannot be universal. If we look at, say mass education, as a professional researcher, then we are looking for large patterns and tendencies, but even here the things we observe will be influenced by the particular questions we ask, and those questions will be consciously or unconsciously censored by personal and professional bias.

In spite of all the preceding caveats, very large numbers of people wish to express opinions about educational processes. What happens politically and socially will depend over time upon some kind of social consensus interacting with facts on the ground – technology changes, budgets, transport systems, even wars. Thus the actual solutions may be less than any idealist would ever hope for.

Sometimes we can see things going wrong on a large scale, and perhaps work to change them. That is, we might agree that in spite of personal differences about “the purpose of education”, some failures are so egregious that they reflect badly on what has actually been happening up to now. A few short anecdotes:

a) Shortly after returning to Australia after about 12 years overseas, I went to a supermarket with a pocket full of change. My huge mistake was to pay for just over $10 worth of groceries with small coins. The checkout girl looked mortified. Though I told her the value, she had to check of course. After three failed tries she was close to tears and called the supervisor. He too was unable to count the coins. Finally, a lady in the increasingly impatient queue behind me produced a calculator. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief. Laboriously they entered the coin values, one by one, into the machine. Well, draw your own conclusions. Evidently technology in this case has caused a regression in common arithmetical skills.

b) Apparently 19% of Americans believe that they are in the top 1% of income earners, while a further 20% are sure that they will achieve the status in their lifetime (Gigerenzer 2014). If this factoid is anything like the true situation, vast numbers of Americans are both deluded and innumerate. Something has gone drastically wrong with their ability to apply critical thinking to the admittedly endless torrent of political propaganda. Also, somehow they have critically failed to understand and apply the concept of percentages. Are these people fit members of an advanced technologically driven society? Think too of the political consequences. Even the supposed professional elites of our societies are often innumerate in devastating ways. Gerd Gigerenzer, the professor of statistics just referenced, tested a thousand physicians on their interpretations of tests central to their daily medical practices. His conclusion was that:

“… my estimate is that 80% of doctors do not understand what a positive test means, even in their own specialties. They are in no position to counsel their patients adequately, nor can they critically evaluate a medical journal article in their own field.” (Gigerenzer 2014)

In the same vein, he refers to a different study of doctor’s statistical literacy:

“In one Australian study of fifty doctors, only thirteen said they could explain what the “positive predictive value” is (the probability of a disease given a positive test). And when asked to do so, only one succeeded.” (Gigerenzer 2014)

c) Just under half of Australian are functionally illiterate. The concept of functional illiteracy is rather flexible, but the meaning here is that these people are unable to decode the dosage instructions on a medicine bottle or read a bus timetable. The level of functional innumeracy is even worse. Give or take a few percentage points, the levels of illiteracy and innumeracy are comparable in all supposedly advanced industrial societies. I have had some involvement with teaching adult illiterates, enough to know that with endless time and love pretty well anyone can be dragged to a level of sufficient competency for most jobs. In institutions of mass education it becomes a political and economic decision to set a cut-off point on diminishing returns with slow learners. Instead they populate the prisons at great expense.

Somewhere there is a key to human learning in the illiteracy & innumeracy problem. Finding that key is as important as research into major diseases. Start with the observation that even the most apparently dumb meathead will step into his souped-up hoon car and weave at high speed through dense traffic with centimeters to spare. Apparently some part of his brain is instantaneously computing a torrent of vectors without error. Give the guy some simple arithmetic and he couldn’t do it – consciously. What is going on? As a driver, no doubt he is subconsciously calibrating some very useful heuristics in real time, but these must be sourced in a kind of math too.

The conceptual puzzle is why some people but not others are able to make conscious use of mathematical potentials which we all seem to have. The “intelligent” ones somehow achieve the trick either through reflection or learning. A similar kind of barrier effect occurs with literacy. Those of us who have had close encounters with cognitive linguistics are well aware that the subconscious generation of language on the fly, spoken or written, is a feat of systemic genius that a century of intensive research has been unable to persuasively explain (though many models rashly make the claim). Yet almost every human who walks the earth becomes a master of language in childhood, and that is irrespective of literacy.

What is this magic of consciousness? Finding a real solution to overcoming the cognitive block between conscious learning and subconscious capacity is one of the major challenges of our civilization, but apparently lacks sex appeal.There is no glory in teaching illiterates or innumerates, and few studies seem to have seriously researched them from a cognitive perspective.

9. One ring to bind them all, or technology to set them free?

The history of technology in education echoes with many paradoxes. Technology has always been a fire god, creator and destroyer.

Pre-literate societies kept a thread of cultural continuity alive through songs and stories passed from generation to generation. These mediums, often collectively called myth, carried the values, histories, understandings and religions of their speakers, and claimed to embed unchanging universal truths. The effect of such collective myths upon those who committed them to memory was to bind people into an invisible but powerful cultural web which gave their lives proper meaning.

The later transcription of selections of this kind of shared myth-culture into written religious scripts like the Christian Bible retained some of the original cultural binding effect. However, hand-written scripts, and then printing especially, freed individual imaginations in new ways to innovate personally, to create their own stories and achieve an historical identity as writers and thinkers. Thus technology had set human relationships on an entirely new trajectory.

As literacy spread, the collective cultural stories of human tribes dispersed into several canons of great minds which followed the territorial imprints of great empires. To be educated meant acquiring some mastery of a library of ideas, not merely the origin songs of a tribe, or even the parables told of one god in a single book. There was the Western canon, shared in the lands of Europe, the Persian & Indian canons permeating central & southern Asia, the Sinitic canons of China and satellite cultures from Vietnam to Japan … and so on.

Well into the 20^th Century, education continued to be defined by canons of accepted knowledge. This was congenial to certain personality types who felt more secure with knowledge from reputed authorities than knowledge acquired through experiment or experience in tough neighbourhoods where a quick wit was the best guarantee of survival. Tension between the solemn bearers of knowledge from authority and the worldly-wise continues to this day (see May 2002).

The canons of inscribed human achievement evolved to include tracts of mathematics, physical and social sciences, material technology, philosophy, histories and of course literatures. It became harder, and then impossible, to be a “fully educated” person in the sense that a 17^th Century European courtier might have claimed. Yet, like old soldiers, cultural pretensions don’t die, they simply fade away. In the 1960s when I was an undergraduate, one literature tutor haughtily asked if I considered myself to be an educated man. I wondered if she knew how to tune the dual barrel carburetor on my Triumph motor bike..

The teaching of cultural canons and technical skills to very large numbers of people led to the birth of mass education. With mass education came a proliferation of purpose designed buildings, soon more ubiquitous than churches, mosques or temples for the first time in history. The larger educational buildings were subdivided into subject areas containing specialists, and the multiplying enterprise of mass education spawned a whole new breed of administrators obsessed with what they called “management”, measurements, agendas, ideologies, politics and eventually marketing. The learner with all her idiosyncratic needs, and the teacher professionally committed to helping the learner … well they tended to disappear beneath the superstructure priorities of real estate, managers and politicians.

The monolithic tendencies of mass education were faithfully reflected in the choice and application of new technologies as they emerged throughout the 20^th Century. Schools, or at least the well-appointed ones, would have laboratories where students all did the same “experiments”, and they would have libraries of approved books whose reading was prescribed. They would have language laboratories where cohorts of students would pretend to learn a foreign language by repeating simultaneous drills through identical headphones … Large monetary investments by governments were needed for all of this mass-use technology, and its provision was always a hot political topic. There was much, much less interest in whether this stuff served a useful purpose, almost no idea of how to genuinely measure such effectiveness over time (e.g. What was the lifetime retention of knowledge? Was this retention rate changing?), and very little investigation of alternative routes to effective learning.

This essay has already noted that nearly half the adult populations of even rich countries like Australia are functionally illiterate and innumerate. As early as 1981 James Asher was noting that 98% of American students never proceeded beyond two years of classroom foreign language study and therefore emerged incompetent. This has not changed, and is general to Anglophone countries. Although Americans have a generally positive view of science, a quarter of them don’t know that the earth revolves around the sun and 48% of them disagreed with the proposition that “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” (Poladian 2014). The research Poladian refers to concluded that the very uneven public understanding of science was not unique to the United States. Clearly mass education as we know it has been an extremely blunt tool with only limited successes. The overall “educational product” would not pass muster in any serious quality control procedure for most commercial products. The factory technology model of education is just not good enough. There has to be a better way.

10. Dispersed technology and the dispersion of learning

Gathering pace since the 1990s there has been a civilizational revolution. Writing created a path for the generational transmission of new ideas from gifted individuals. Printing multiplied the spread of individual ideas and stimulated the synthesis of new ones. Mass education set crude templates for passing large slabs of knowledge onto whole populations. Its transformational effects were profound but uneven. Now electronic technologies – personal computers, smart phones, the Internet – are creating channels which remove the monopoly on the distribution of new knowledge from institutions. Schools, colleges and universities are struggling to understand the democratization of knowledge. Some attempt, piecemeal, to make some use of it (e.g. May 2005, Morotomi 2014), but the processes are spinning in so many directions that planning prediction becomes almost impossible. This is anathema to the institutional and political mind, so official resistance is also evident at various levels.

With superficially unlimited access to information online for peasants, company presidents, children and researchers, complexity also multiplies beyond control. Misinformation spreads as rapidly genuine insight. The skills needed by learners are no longer passive (if they ever were). The ability to ask the right questions online and offline becomes critical. The ability to filter misinformation becomes an issue of survival.

The problems of how to assess and accredit students working independently and often unpredictably on their own initiative is totally baffling yesterday’s guardians of the canons of accepted knowledge. Stay tuned.

References & Reading List

(Note that the writers in these links are expressing their own views. I don't necessarily share them. Apologies for the excessive number of my own papers referenced here, but this topic has been embedded in my career, such as it was).

Akin, Festus (July 23, 2014) "Innovation and challenge of the British education system". LinkedIn website, online @ http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140723234653-37336684-innovation-and-challenge-of-the-british-education-system?trk=eml-ced-b-art-Ch-4-9107279322531634392&midToken=AQEpyF6vbUXU3w&fromEmail=fromEmail&ut=1pqcS4HzHLE6k1

Asher, James (August 1981) "Fear of Foreign Languages". Psychology Today, reprinted online @ http://www.tpr-world.com/foreign-languages.pdf

Australian Broadcasting Commission (2 August 2013) "What's In The Gonski Report?", ABC (Australia) website online @ http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-08-27/whats-in-the-gonski-report/4219508

Australian Primary Principal's Association (2014) "The Gonski Report - Review of Funding for Schooling". APPA website, online @ http://www.appa.asn.au/gonski-report.php

Bear, John and Allen Ezell (June 13, 2012 ) "Does Your Doctor Have a Fake Degree? The Billion-Dollar Industry That Has Sold Over a Million Fake Diplomas". AlterNet website, online @ http://www.alternet.org/story/155864/does_your_doctor_have_a_fake_degree_the_billion-dollar_industry_that_has_sold_over_a_million_fake_diplomas?page=0%2C3

Burningham, Grant (May 25, 2014) "China boasts the world's top students but are they equipped to cope beyond the classroom?". Sydney Morning Herald, online @ http://www.smh.com.au/world/china-boasts-the-worlds-top-students-but-are-they-equipped-to-cope-beyond-the-classroom-20140524-38vvu.html#ixzz32g3LxR7d

Craven, Greg (October 3, 2012) "Petty elitists need to be taught value of diversity". Brisbane Times online @ http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/politics/petty-elitists-need-to-be-taught-value-of-diversity-20121002-26xam.html#ixzz28Bx2s1rb

Chomsky, Noam (2012) “The Purpose of Education”. The Daily Riff website, online @ http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/noam-chomsky-the-purpose-of-education-869.php

Education Scotland (n.d.) "The purpose of the curriculum". Department of Education, Scotland, online @ http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/thecurriculum/whatiscurriculumforexcellence/thepurposeofthecurriculum/

Gigerenzer, Gerd (2014) Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions. [highly recommended] pub. Viking Adult. Available online (including ebook format) @ http://www.amazon.com/Risk-Savvy-Make-Good-Decisions/dp/0670025658

Gillespie, Ian (August 13, 2014) "Transformers point way to programmable matter". Brisbane Times online @ http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/technology/sci-tech/transformers-point-way-to-programmable-matter-20140813-1013il.html

Gillin, Lauren (March 19, 2014) "New study says electronic media is bad for kids". Brisbane Times online @ http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/new-study-says-electronic-media-is-bad-for-kids-20140318-350dj.html#ixzz2wMEJbNbp

Gittins, Ross (April 19, 2014) "Modern economists are clever with numbers but way out of tune". Sydney Morning Herald, online @ http://www.smh.com.au/business/modern-economists-are-clever-with-numbers-but-way-out-of-tune-20140418-36w84.html#ixzz2zNX7ctq2

Gonski, David (February 21, 2012) "We need to stop both nation and needy from falling behind". Brisbane Times online @ http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/politics/we-need-to-stop-both-nation-and-needy-from-falling-behind-20120220-1tjka.html#ixzz1myFU2PAd

Guo, Philip (October 2010) "The main purpose of education". Philip J. Guo website, online @ http://pgbovine.net/purpose-of-education.htm

Hawking, Stephen (4 October 2013) "What They Don't Teach You at Oxford". http://mag.newsweek.com/2013/10/04/what-they-don-t-teach-you-at-oxford.html#!

He Na, Liu Ce and Luo Wangshu (2014-07-23) "Faking the grade for overseas study". China Daily online @ http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/2014-07/23/content_17901110.htm?bsh_bid=458222444&from=timeline&isappinstalled=0

Hurst, Daniel (January 25, 2013) "Young adults still fare badly in earning and learning". Brisbane Times online @ http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/education/young-adults-still-fare-badly-in-earning-and-learning-20130124-2d9p9.html#ixzz2IwJhErKN

Huber, Josef (n.d) "Seven theses on teacher education and the purpose of education". The European Wergeland Centre, online @ http://www.theewc.org/statement/seven.theses.on.teacher.education.and.the.purpose.of.education.2

Inman, Michael (September 16, 2012) "International students sue to get bachelor for their buck". Brisbane Times online @ http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/tertiary-education/international-students-sue-to-get-bachelor-for-their-buck-20120915-25yx3.html#ixzz26aCaq4Cy

Jackson-Webb, Fron ( June 21, 2013) "Engaged children lead successful lives". EssentialKids website, online @ http://www.essentialkids.com.au/older-kids/education-for-older-kids/engaged-children-lead-successful-lives-20130620-2olw5.html#utm_source=FD&utm_medium=lifeandstylepuff&utm_campaign=schoolsuccess

Josh B. (February 15, 2014) "The Myth of the Bell Curve". [read the comments for critique] LinkedIn online @ http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140215200145-131079-the-myth-of-the-bell-curve?trk=eml-ced-b-art-M-3&midToken=AQEpyF6vbUXU3w&ut=17IP0vg_CbbC81

Kelly, Melissa (n.d) "What Is the Aim of Education? - Different Opinions About the Purpose of Education". About.com website online @ http://712educators.about.com/od/teachingstrategies/tp/What-Is-The-Aim-Of-Education.htm

Kitchen, Taren (2013). “What is the purpose of education?: The most important question in the education revolution”. TED Talks website, online @ http://www.ted.com/conversations/20241/what_is_the_purpose_of_educati.html

Martin, Peter (August 21, 2012) "'Education making us ignorant'". Brisbane Times online @ http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/education-making-us-ignorant-20120820-24ipb.html#ixzz248MMZodZ

May, Thor (2013) "The Limits of Education". Thor's Short Cuts blog, online @ http://thorshortcuts.byeways.net/2013/05/20/265-the-limits-of-education/

May, Thor (2013) “Testing for Teaching; Teaching to What?” Academia.edu website, online @ https://www.academia.edu/2393660/Testing_for_Teaching_Teaching_to_What

May, Thor (2013) “International Language Testing - Standing the monster on its head” . Academia.edu website, online @ https://www.academia.edu/3321484/International_Language_Testing_Washback_-_standing_the_monster_on_its_head

May, Thor (2012) “ Hidden Boundaries: – A Joint-Venture Education Program in China” . Academia.edu website, online @ https://www.academia.edu/2291935/Hidden_Boundaries_-_A_Joint-Venture_Education_Program_in_China

May, Thor (2011) “Why Write a PhD?”. Academia.edu website, online @ https://www.academia.edu/1978293/Why_Write_A_PhD

May, Thor (2010) " Language Tangle : Predicting and Facilitating Outcomes in Language Education". Doctoral dissertation from the University of Newcastle. Through examining a series of twenty case studies, this thesis deals with issues of knowledge worker productivity. An abstract of the dissertation can be seen here. http://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay/Papers/1605533/Language_Tangle_-_Predicting_and_Facilitating_Outcomes_in_Language_Education_-_PhD_Thesis_-_ThorMay. The thesis is also online in the University of Newcastle research depository at http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/804346 . A further link is the Australian Research Directory.

May, Thor (2008) “Corruption and Other Distortions as Variables in Language Education”. TESOL Law Journal, Vol.2 March 2008; direct online access @ http://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay/Papers/1615553/Corruption_and_Other_Distortions_as_Variables_in_Language_Education
May, Thor (2006) “ Is Assessment a Satire? - The Conspiracy of South Kogglebot”. Academia.edu website, online @ https://www.academia.edu/1919347/Is_Assessment_a_Satire_-_The_Conspiracy_of_South_Kogglebot

May, Thor (2005) "Rude Thoughts About IT In Language Education". Academia.edu online @ http://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay/Papers/1671112/Rude_Thoughts_About_IT_in_Language_Education . Also at http://thormay.net/lxesl/itinlxeducation.html. b) An earlier, less referenced version of this paper was published in the ASIAN EFL JOURNAL, vol.1, 2005 at http://asian-efl-journal.com/pta_jan_04_tm.html. c) A slightly shorter (6,637 words) but up to date version has also been published as "Brief Thoughts About IT in Language Education" in TEACHING ENGLISH WITH TECHNOLOGY, vol.5/2 May 2005 (IATEFL Poland) at http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_article21.htm .

May, Thor (2002) “The Paradox of Scholarship: Pissing On Every Lamp Post”. Academia.edu website, online @ https://www.academia.edu/2227990/The_paradox_of_scholarship_pissing_on_every_lamp_post

May, Thor (2001) “Unseen Grammar – Suspecting the god of cracks between the floorboards”. Academia.edu website, online @ https://www.academia.edu/2312782/Unseen_Grammar_-_Suspecting_the_God_of_Cracks_Between_the_Floorboards

May, Thor (2001) “Student Activism : Truth and False Prophets”. The Passionate Skeptic website, online @ http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/student.html

May, Thor (2000) “Teaching as a Subversive Activity”. The Passionate Skeptic website, online @ http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/teachers.html

May, Thor (1997) “Apprentice Literacy: Designs for a Bonfire of the Vanities”. FINE PRINT Vol. 20 No. 4 December 1997. Academia.edu website, online @ https://www.academia.edu/1788758/Apprentice_Literacy_Designs_for_a_Bonfire_of_the_Vanities

May, Thor (1996, 2012) “ Thor's "Technical & Further Education in Australia: Is there a star to steer by?". Academia.edu website, online @ https://www.academia.edu/1777165/Technical_and_Further_Education_in_Australia_Is_there_a_star_to_steer_by

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National Centre for Vocational Education & Research Australia. See the research publications index. NCVER online @ http://www.ncver.edu.au

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Wikipedia(2014) "Spaced Repitition ". Wikipedia online @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetitionZyngier, David (September 5, 2012) "Teachers learn at the school of hard knocks". Brisbane Times online @ http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/politics/teachers-learn-at-the-school-of-hard-knocks-20120904-25ci5.html#ixzz25YI6YVCR

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Source of this essay

meetup group: Brisbane Active Thinking Meetup http://www.meetup.com/Brisbane-Active-Thinking-Meetup/

topics already discussed: http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/DiscussionTopics/DiscussionIndex.htm

comments: Thor May - thormay@yahoo.com

Professional bio: Thor May has a core professional interest in cognitive linguistics, at which he has rarely succeeded in making a living. He has also, perhaps fatally in a career sense, cultivated an interest in how things work – people, brains, systems, countries, machines, whatever… In the world of daily employment he has mostly taught English as a foreign language, a stimulating activity though rarely regarded as a profession by the world at large. His PhD dissertation, Language Tangle, dealt with language teaching productivity. Thor has been teaching English to non-native speakers, training teachers and lecturing linguistics, since 1976. This work has taken him to seven countries in Oceania and East Asia, mostly with tertiary students, but with a couple of detours to teach secondary students and young children. He has trained teachers in Australia, Fiji and South Korea. In an earlier life, prior to becoming a teacher, he had a decade of finding his way out of working class origins, through unskilled jobs in Australia, New Zealand and finally England (after backpacking across Asia in 1972).

contact: http://thormay.net thormay@yahoo.com

academic repository: Academia.edu at http://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay

discussion: Thor's Unwise Ideas at http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/unwisendx.html

The Purpose of Education - A Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy? (c) Thor May 2014

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