What constitutes effectiveness?

[Skip Zilla]

Is "effectiveness" of educators' interventions in the learning of their students analogous to the effectiveness of the interventions of medical professionals in the functionality of their patients? What do we think students want (lack)? Do the ways we answer these questions say more about us, our needs, and what we believe, than about them, what they lack (want), and what they are likely to grow to believe?

[Ian Carmichael]

The 'classic' educational discussion certainly seems more about us, and our needs - inasmuch as the discussion hinges on skills and competencies (Rupert Murdoch, for example, in the [Australian] ABC Boyer lectures has deliberated on the need for skills through education.)
However, if the futurologists are right and subsequent decades will throw up a wide range of jobs we haven't yet envisaged, then skills training will necessarily equip students with obsolete/irrelevant skills. SO - why do it?

On the main track of your question though, it's more than time to take on a 'wellness' model of education - as positive psychology has taken on in psychology. Rather than supplying/remedying defects and lacks, I'd like to be working with deepening the humanity of children - and certainly not reducing it. This keys in to the fearful statistics from Mike on pain and punishment control [- "this is what you must do - or we clobber you: physically (paddle), or emotionally(ignoring/humiliating), or socially (detention)]
But if we think about humanness - and there's much already here in FL about it, there should be huge differences in our structures, approaches, engagements and regimes compared to the classic mass education processes.

But these questions are unwelcome amongst the quantifiers. How do we measure humanness? (It's the essential problem of utilitarianism; namely if untilitarianism relies on quantification of a value such as happinness, pleasure, justice or choice [to take just four variants] in order to evaluate what should be done, it can't succeed in its evaluation if the recognised value can't in fact be quantified.)

On the other hand, if we understand the personality and potentialities of humanness - ethical sociality, effective individuality, multiple and disciplinary intelligences (etc.) we can more easily say that if these are the usual range of humanness, education should function in discovering and enhancing these attributes, and the ability to understand and interact with other instantiations (- through cultural, linguistic, religious and historical impetus).

Hmm, I'm rushed and unclear. I think this needs an essay! I'll get back to it later. What I mean in that last paragraph, is as we become human (through our framework) we also need to be able to understand and interact with other frameworks for developing humanness (neither demonising, or deifying the other.)