Abstract: This teacher reports his experience working in Afghanistan helping an Afghan Ministry of Education team in the business of recasting the countrys elementary school program. With funding from the Afghan government and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) the team set out to prepare new textbooks for every subject and every grade from 1 through 6. The books and teachers guides were written field tested published and distributed. The work was finally completed in 1977. This teacher learned that even among old hands at the task of technical assistance there was no common understanding of what for should be. The problem seemed to be that while both Afghans and foreign advisers took the connection between education and development for granted no one had critically examined the fundamental question as to what that connection is. Now 5 years later this individual is still pondering the question. There is much talk about literacy relevance and practicality but it is hard to get away from the notion that Afghanistan and countries like it need something more something antecedent to those obvious necessities. The take-off point in the history of every developed country has been the historical moment when a critical mass of its population acquired the moral and intellectual self-confidence to take charge of its own destiny. A liberal education is one that frees the mind from the bonds of time and place and it is an education for change for development. As an educational philosophy it is as relevant today as it was for the ancient Greeks. Liberal studies are liberal because they are intended to help students free themselves from tradition to give them confidence in their capacity to go beyond the safety of conventional explanation and behavior to ask new questions and to accept new answers. If a significant number of the Afghan people were given an education that turns its attention to the future and Afghanistan would need no windfall discoveries of gold oil or precious stones. Significant change will come only when new skills are taught in such a way that a human beings natural creativity and inventiveness are stimulated and rewarded.
Publication Year: 1980
Publication Date: 1980-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
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