ABSTRACT
Teachers make decisions about what to do in school, about what to teach and how to teach it, about what to pass on and what to ignore. Their reasons for these decisions may vary and indeed any single decision may depend, not on one, but on several reasons. Yet these will normally include some kind of notion (more or less explicit) both of the aims of education generally and of a particular lesson or course. Thus an eleven-year-old class, for example, engaged in writing an English composition may be so occupied just because this is the way by which the teacher can get them settled down to work; equally it may be that this activity is planned to ensure that they will acquire the skills of literacy essential for GCE in later years, and in this case a requirement thought to be necessary by both parents and the State: yet again such learning may have been selected by the teacher as a means of involving the pupils in worthwhile experiences, and of helping them acquire worthwhile skills. These reasons, expediency, the demands of parents and society, the value implicit in the activity itself, or its result, must in some way affect the way in which the teacher goes about the task. They are in part the criteria by which the teacher selects what to do and what he hopes to achieve: further, they are the means by which the success or failure of the activity can be assessed. In this sense they are the aims or the objectives of the activity, an activity which is part of the educational process. Similarly, to talk of the aim of a mathematics course as the achievement of an A-level pass in pure mathematics is to give a specific objective to this course and one which can be evaluated.
