AIMS and PURPOSES
in EDUCATION
JOEY R. MIÑANO
EDUCATIONAL AIMS
Educational Aims Performs 3 Important
Functions (Normative)
1. Give direction to the educative process.
• before one makes a change in the curriculum or
plans a new school building or adds new personnel
to the staff, he must ask what his objectives are. It
is worthwhile to be conscious of what direction,
custom and tradition are carrying the educative
process.
2. Aims not only should give direction to
education but should motivate it as
well.
• Aims are values, and if they are valued,
if they are wanted, they should induce
the learner to release the energies
necessary to accomplish them.
3. Aims have the function of providing a
criterion for evaluating the
educational process
• Whether one is examining students or
accrediting high schools and colleges,
he must have reference to initial
objectives.
HOW AIMS FUNCTION
Act purposely, to consider future
events in the light of the past, all one
acting intelligently…
• to distinguish aims or objectives from
outcomes or results. The former are a
matter of foresight, while the latter are the
matter of hindsight. The former are what
one tries to learn or teach; while the latter
what actually succeeds in learning or
teaching.
Reshaped to meet the
needs of a dynamic
environment
• that educational aims
should emerge from
experience. It is not only
purposeful but personal.
Serve the educative process
• that education must be a judicious
mixture of a participation in present life
and preparation for subsequent events.
• education should properly put more
stress on preparation for adulthood
than on a present interests of
childhood.
• education and college should aim at
life, life here and now, emerges from
the past and imperceptibly merges with
the future.
The PROXIMATE AIMS OF EDUCATION
Aims must be tailor-made for the
occasion
• aims arise out of concrete situations in
which the people are involved.
Enumeration of Educational Values
should be fairly complete and
satisfactory.
Various Values Consisting the Ultimate
Aim of Education
1. The Ultimate quest for perfection
Literally the last and final end of education
…Religious view of the world: to teach the child
how to act, and has the lives of Jesus and the
saints to instate, this would be the concrete
embodiment of the aim.
Bible: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which
is in heaven is perfect”
2. Self-Realization: a more definite
character by declaring that the
chief and ultimate end of education
is the Cultivation of Intellect, this
should not be confused with Self-
expression.
Man lives among his fellows: it is a matter
of balanced participation in the institution
of the society.
Human nature should examine, see what
is its potentialities, and then set up an
Educational program which aims to
actualize or realize them.
Rousseau’s Idea: education should
aim to perfect the individual in all
his powers “the object of education
is not to make a soldier, magistrate,
or priest, but to make an educated
man”.
…formal discipline of the mind –
intellectual excellence does not
so much consists in the pursuit
of knowledge on its own
account.
3. Ultimate growth: the ultimate aim of education is
not just physically but in greater insight into and
control over one’s environment.
John Dewey: “The educational process has no end
beyond itself; is its own end”.
Aims and Purposes in Education
Philosophical view
An aim is a logical prerequisite of a
practical theory.
Unless some end is regarded as valuable
no practical theory is possible.
A practical theory consists simply of an
argument providing recommendations for
achieving some end thought desirable.
Practice is always theory-loaded.
Distinction between an aim and a
purpose
Someone who is engaged in a practical task
What are you doing? What are you doing it for?
to presuppose some end outside
someone is being asked to
the activity itself, which the
specify what his action is, to
activity is designed and intended
state its content
to bring about
I am digging over What are you digging
that piece of ground So that I can grow
this piece of
for? potatoes in it
ground thoroughly
Aim Purpose
Purpose
• The answer is given in instrumental terms, one thing
being done in order to achieve another, the end product
lying outside the activity itself. ‘Purposes’ point to ends
external to an activity.
Aim
• The answer does not refer to any external end, it merely
makes clear what is being done.
To talk of purposes is always to refer to some
external end to which the activity is directed, to talk
of aims is not to refer to external ends but to the
activity itself, to its internal end.
Relevance in Education
A teacher maybe asked to state his aim in a particular lesson,
that is to make clear what he is doing or trying to do.
He may also be asked what is really a separate question,
namely, why he is doing it, what he is doing it for, what his
purpose is in trying to get his pupils to write poetry or to
solve quadratic equations.
So too, it is possible to ask of education itself, what its aims
are and what its purpose maybe.
Educational Aims
The aim of education, as has already been suggested, is to
produce an educated man, one who meets the various
criteria of intellectual, moral and aesthetic development.
Subordinate aims of education: the development of
literary awareness, or the giving of an appreciation of
scientific or mathematical modes of thinking, but taken all
together these various subordinate aims coalesce in the
overall end of making a certain kind of person.
To ask the aim of education is to conceive of education as
an end in itself, something intrinsically good, involving the
development of a person.
Educational Purposes
The purpose of education, it might be said, is to
increase the number of literate, knowledgeable
citizens, or to produce sufficient numbers of doctors,
lawyers, civil servants, engineers and the like.
Here the reference is to valuable ends which lies
outside the actual practice of education, social,
political or economic ends.
To ask the purpose or purposes of education is to think
of it as a device designed to bring about external
goods, skilled workers, executive, and professionals.
Summary
Aims
Purpose
It is because of this Aims and Purpose
distinction that it is Education, it may be
often said that the thought, being an end The educated man
aims of education are to itself should not be needs also to be a
internal and that it is regarded in terms of good citizen, a good
inappropriate to ask purpose. But it makes worker, a good
for an aim which lies good sense to ask: colleague, and being
outside education Why do we want well- educated man may be,
itself. developed, sensitive, indeed should be, a
intellectually great help in achieving
equipped, useful these worthwhile
people? external ends.
Education has
important purposes as
well as important aims.
Learning is finding out what you
already know. Doing is demonstrating
that you know it. Teaching is
reminding others that they know just
as well as you.
You are all learners, doers,
teachers.
Richard Bach
