What Is the Purpose of Education?

School vs Learning

By calling it ‘school’ (rather than learning), and ‘a job’ (rather than work), we’re unwittingly creating a tone of drudgery and compliance that centers the institutions and their processes (grades, academic success and performance), and de-centers the end result (skills–>understanding–>creativity–>wisdom).
Learning: Education: Work: Job
This is a real problem for several reasons, and creates a convenient pathway from ‘doing good in school’ to ‘getting a good job’ rather than ‘finding and using information,’ ‘figuring out who I am’ ‘learning to read closely and write deeply ’or ‘to do good work.’
I can already sense how easy it is to dismiss this as some awful and colorful collision of hippies, philosophy, and semantics, but next time you walk into a school, pay attention to how much joy you see while learning. Not in the hallways, playgrounds, or favorite group activities, but in the learning process itself.
This shouldn’t imply that learning means giggling and chaos–joy comes in many forms, and high-pressure academic learning that pursues proficiency rarely produces it. But make it a point to look.
While only an opinion, I genuinely believe that the vast majority of social ills that plague us–as a planet, not just in one country–stem from a surplus of bad work. At the very best, they tempt us with regular paychecks, which allow a mortgage and a car payment, and soon we’re seemingly stuck; life moves quickly downhill at that point. (See Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman or Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.)
And because we’ve all had terrible jobs, it’s easy to shrug it off as a necessary evil in life, but it’s not. Work that demeans, dehumanizes, mechanizes, and depersonalizes individuals also, by design, demean, dehumanizes, mechanizes, and depersonalizes society at large, and telling people to ‘be thankful they have a job’ is an antiquated response that misses the point.
People do need to be thankful for work, but that has nothing to do with efforts to improve the nature of the work itself.
The curse of social conditioning and norm-referencing here is also at play: we see it on sitcoms, read about it on facebook, and see it when we’re at a fast-food restaurant, called by a telemarketer, or spammed in our email. It becomes easy to accept, but bad work is crippling. Work can be the intersection of passion, talent, training, and opportunity, or it can be a 65-year trudge that makes life almost unbearable.