What is the Purpose of Education?

What is the purpose of education?

What Is Education Today?

Education in the United States today is often times conceptualized through a restrictive, institutional, lens that starts at a particular age, stops at a particular age, and, after a number of landmarks, is supposed to reward the student with particular outcomes based off their educational achievements. Class paradigms revolve around these concepts of education, thereby categorizing folks into their social positions regardless of what their aptitude might be. Whereas this social signifiers where somewhat less meaningful in times of industrialization, the post-industrial (post-factory) society has created new standards of achievement and exponentially greater competitive environments while retaining, more or less, the same model of educating students.

In their article “Bring It On Home,” David Sobel and Gregory Smith explain,

Since the end of World War II, schools have preoccupied themselves with cultivating human economic capital -- those skills that individuals need to participate in a competitive market economy. Developing human capital in the form of scientific or engineering expertise, analytic skill, or sophisticated forms of literacy has without question contributed to the economic expansion of the US. This focus, however, has led to the neglect of another form of capital also essential to our well-being -- social capital, which refers to the forms of trust and mutuality that hold communities together.”

Education today has devalued our human tendencies -- particularly those towards how we emote, how we relate to one another, the impact we have on other lives and the planet especially through designated systems -- in favor of factory-, and war-, model education that prepares both students and the country for grander growth at whatever human cost. Many school curricula, for instance, are moving towards global awareness, global citizenship, or global literacy programs that promote this exponential economic growth model, preparing students for placement in a so-called rapidly changing world. What catastrophic consequences will succeed these models prioritizing economic growth and value over human growth?

Additional questions about who’s interests these models serve remain. More and more, corporate oligarchs are influencing education policy reform (“Billionaires for Education Reform” by Diane Ravitch) which not only shapes the learning environments in which students are being taught, but are also reinforcing global economic agendas. In Rethinking Schools’ publication Rethinking Globalization: Teaching For Justice in an Unjust World, former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide writes,

Behind crisis of dollars there is a human crisis: among the poor, immeasurable human suffering; among the others, the powerful, the policymakers, a poverty of spirit which has made a religion of the market and its invisible hand. A crisis of imagination so profound that the only measure of value is profit, the only measure of human progress is economic growth. (“Globalization: A View From Below,” )

If education in the US today is measuring progress by economic growth and driving students towards producers and products of this growth, than there must be change. As Martin Luther King, Jr. famously proclaimed in his speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

What Should Education Be?

Silence must be broken. As a society, we should be awarding ourselves the opportunity grow towards our fullest capacity as human beings in relationship to other human beings, not automatons disengaged from life and purpose. Grace and Jimmy Boggs express in their pamphlet Education to Govern,

In order to realize his or her highest potential as a human being, every young person must be given a profound and continuing sense (a) of his or her own life as an integral part of the continuing evolution of the human species; and (b) of the unique capacity of human beings to shape and create reality in accordance with conscious purposes and plans.

The purpose of education should be to grow ourselves as individuals, in relation to others and in relation to our environment. While the current educational model places greater value on categorized and institutionalized educational environments and at what points in life education is to occur, a broader concept of education recognizes that this happens through a tremendous number of mediums (learning environments) and media (means of communication/communicating ideas). In fact, this must occur through varying mediums and media as learning styles and educational styles are not rote acts, but human acts of growth and development which must be honored and embraced.

Education for self-growth and self-awareness

If in our education we are to move towards self-growth and self-awareness, then we should be treated as unique individuals with different lived experiences and different life paths. We should be recognized as learning differently than those we are grouped with. We should be recognized as having different abilities, different intelligences, and different relationships to how and why we do what we do. It is therefore hugely important that our education cultivate our own creative expressions of our navigation of our learning experiences and self-growth. Additionally, we should ground ourselves in culturally relevant education that, while inclusive of other experiences, also honestly grounds us in where we’ve come from so we know where we’re going.

Education in relation to others

While the significance of grounding ourselves in self-growth is crucial to profound educational experiences, we should also embrace our relationship to others as unique individuals; our becoming only evolves in relation to other unique individuals. This embrace of different lived experiences will enhance so many of the emotional literacies that have been nearly eliminated from our treatment as producers. Some of these include: compassion, empathy, love, kindness, sacrifice and compromise, and the other emotional depths that define our human experience. Moreover, in avaricious and selfish systems, we can grow our intuitive capacity to recognize the ways by which so many are driven down so that so few can propel up.

Education in relation to environment

In building critical compassion through education for self-growth and cultivating roots in interconnectedness, we can further move towards critical analyses of social and ecological environments. We can ground ourselves more deeply in systems analyses, power analyses, and the ways that, particularly, economic systems and systematic disempowerment has created the conditions for unsustainable environments. Place-based and solutions-oriented education models provide a tremendous opportunity for empowered responses to real needs. Education should not merely prepare individuals for entry into these systems beyond the “classroom.” Rather, the classroom should embody what’s meaningful to those in learning environments and what is impactful for them in their everyday lives.

Author and teacher Herbert Kohl wrote,

And I believe that respect for persons, for teachers and students, is at the core of good education. Consequently it is up to those of us who care about the moral quality of life in the school to question the values at the core of current pseudo-school reform and refuse to accept dehumanizing, damaging, and morally questionable schooling. (“The Educational Panopticon”)

Education based on critical engagements with ourselves and one another is not merely a matter of institutional reform; it is a responsibility and ethic. It definitively exclaims that we have the imagination, the creativity, and the power to restore the human relationships that have been all but removed from the mechanics of restrictive educational models. We should never concede to the value that we stop learning, that we stop growing. We should strive towards an ever-lasting education that values ourselves and one another.