Quality education

It's essential to tell the difference between "education" and "schooling" when talking about or defining quality. Some of the literature does make this distinction, but a lot of it mixes these two ideas, sometimes as if they were the same thing. This may be especially true for people who work in the "quality management" paradigm, where "institutional effectiveness" is often used as a synonym for "quality of education." 

Even though it's a bit old, Hirst and Peters' (1970:19) broad definition of "education" is an excellent place to start to make the distinction. They say that education is "the process of bringing out the best in people." No one can agree on the end of "desirable qualities" or what they are. We want to make the point that you must understand these educational goals before you can think about quality in detail.

On the other hand, schooling is about providing the service of "education," which means educating young people through institutionalized and universalized "organized" learning. At the beginning of the 20th century, everyone getting a "basic education" was seen as a big step forward for both individuals and society. However, this idea is still hotly debated regarding what it means and how it should be interpreted.

Sayed's (1997) argument that the idea of "quality" in education is vague and often used but never defined is based on the importance of this distinction. He discusses how its meanings reflect "different ideological, social, and political values." By criticizing some of the most important ways to improve the quality of education, Sayed shows what he calls the value bases of any framework for improving the quality of education. Using the work of Bunting (1993), he says, "Quality in education does have a bottom line, and that line is set by the goals and values that make education a fundamentally human activity."

​The clear implication is that the ends or goals of an institution/school for the students must be the starting point for our understanding of the idea of quality in education so that we don't "reify the practice of education" and turn it into a technical activity that is static and unaffected by context and circumstance. 

Here at SMIS, our objectives for our students are clear, we want them to be independent and holistically developed by having quality teachers, excellent facilities, and small class sizes, and we are proud to have achieved these for 27 years! We define and meet our definition of quality education.