The University of Surrey Student Experience Strategy is founded on the vision of a complete education that prepares people for the challenges and uncertainties of their future lives. The Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education shares and supports this vision through the concepts of a Life-Wide Curriculum and Experiential Learning Award. This part of the wiki explores the concept of a complete education and its potential relationship with a life-wide curriculum.

 A complete education.pdf

 Life-Wide Curriculum - the means to developing a complete education.pdf

According to wikipedia 'education encompasses both the teaching and learning of knowledge, proper conduct, and technical competency. It thus focuses on the cultivation of skills, trades or professions, as well as mental, moral & aesthetic development.  Formal education consists of systematic instruction, teaching and training by professional teachers. This consists of the application of pedagogy and the development of curricula. Informal education includes knowledge and skills learned and refined during the course of life, including education that comes from experience in practicing a profession. Society subsidizes institutions such as museums and libraries to promote informal self-education'.

The idea of the life-wide curriculum forces us to recognise and appreciate both the formal and informal, instructed and self-taught dimensions of education and the multiple domains in which we need to educate ourselves. The mission of a university that embraces the idea of a 'life-wide curriculum' is supporting the ideals of an 'education for life' rather than an education that is only concerned with preparing for employment or preparing for a specific vocation like being an engineer, lawyer or nurse - althought these may be the most important things in a learners self-concept of their education for life.

Completeness suggests that something is finished, whole, satisfied.. but the process of education must be a life-long enterprise - a never ending process. While certain stages or aspects of life might be rich in formal learning others are predominantly based on informal learning. The two forms of education/ learning are complementary and necessary. Indeed outside the safety and security of the formal education system we have to invent our own processes and resources for educating ourselves and it is essentially an informal self-directed and self-regulated process. This is where the idea of learning how to learn takes off – we have to be able to create the conditions in the multiple and simultaneous dimensions of our lives that enable us to learn and develop the wisdom necessary to be successful.

Given the problematic nature of completeness in the context of education as a life-long and life-wide learning process, perhaps ‘a more complete education’ is a better visionary goal and moral purpose for a university. The goal of a more complete education might be to enable people to find, appreciate and pursue their own educational goals throughout and in all parts of their lives regardless of whether they are set by teachers, parents or managers in the workplace or they are grown by personal need or ambition. This is a pretty good vision of what education means in the context of a life-wide curriculum.