What Is the Purpose of Education?

The Role Of Schools

Whether or not this is the ‘responsibility’ of the schools or the family seems like an appropriate question, but that also misses the point: no matter what sort of values a family promotes, the learning process, by design, changes a person. Whatever learning experiences a person has, then, are everything. The Awl recently published a post that underscored this idea.
“Let’s put ourselves in the undergraduate student’s position. Someone eighteen years old, embarking on an academic career, might well ask: Will this world welcome me, welcome my potential abilities? Or am I being trained for life on a hamster wheel? Is my value simply the value of a hamster that can run, a bioform for the Matrix to plug into, and extract my essence for the benefit of a larger machine? Is this world full of possibilities, is it asking me to contribute, welcoming my contribution, valuing me for the things known and unknown that I may one day be able to contribute? Or am I being wronged from the start, treated as a “customer,” which all too often means, alas, someone to fleece?
Is the world full of smart and welcoming adults who are interested in what I have to say, encouraging me to work hard and learn and try things, or is it full of thieves and charlatans who are out to rip me off and saddle me with debt and enslave me before I even get a chance to start my adult life?
Let’s consider this from the educator’s point of view, as well. Doesn’t the quality of a culture rely in part on a deep, dynamic interaction between those who are adults now, and those who will be soon?”
And in that intersection sits education.
This makes the concept of good work critical to consider not just in a unit essential question or a dry academic standard but by evolving schools the same way so many progressive organizations seek to behave today: not as financial entrepreneurs, but social entrepreneurs. This happens not by standards and accountability, but substantively changing how we do business.
Getting a job is not the purpose of school. Good work is a shared core of both education and social improvement. I’m not entirely sure what this means for learning on a practical level, but I keep having the idea of diverse learning forms embedded in authentic local communities as a kind of first response.
Without good work to greet them when they ‘finish school,’ what exactly are they graduating to? Discerning this good work–one’s life work–requires self-knowledge and wisdom that both precede and transcend content knowledge. If we insist on the latter, it absolutely has to be in service of the former.