Pre-service Teachers’ Views on What Are and Should Be the Goals of Education

Abstract

Accountability in education is an increasingly common activity. However, accountability tends to assess progress made in various subject matters, and it never seems to face the more basic question of how important any subject matter is. Two teachers, who have had the same training, teaching the same subject to two very similar groups of children, using the same book, and covering the same content material may end up producing quite different effects in those two groups of children. Accountability, therefore, should require us to specify clearly the kinds of effects we need to produce in our children. As a student in the College of Education and the Department of Speech-Communication, I have been bombarded with theories of what should be taught and of what children need to learn. Regardless of what is taught, my question is this: Is there any valid way of defining and measuring what any population believes should be taught to children, and to what extent are the future teachers who are now in the College of Education acquiring these professed values?