have lost sight of, or at least seldom discuss, the purpose of education. What is the purpose of an education? That may seem like a fairly easy question to answer, but if you read on you will see that it is not. In fact, it is a question that we humans have grappled with for quite a while--and continue to grapple with.
Below you will find a number of points of view about what the purpose of
education should be. I offer them for your consideration because, whether you
are a teacher, a student, the parent of a student, or a taxpayer who supports
public education, unless you believe that there is a clear and profound purpose
for education, then sending children to school for it is a waste of time.
I have intentionally restricted the points of view presented below to those
expressed by our contemporaries (the one exception being Abraham Lincoln)
because the purpose of today’s education is what, I believe, needs to be carefully
considered and clarified. However, some of you might want to go further back
into history and research what thoughtful people like Plato and Aristotle and
our Founding Fathers believed was the purpose of education. And I encourage you
to do that.
At the end of this blog I have included a link to a recent article discussing the challenge of defining the purpose of education in the modern age and a link to a website where you can join the conversation about the purpose of education. In the end, I hope that each reader of this blog will carefully consider what s/he believes is the purpose of education. It matters.
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Do I risk being stoned in the public marketplace if I suggest that the purpose of education is not to make kids economically valuable, but rather to enable them to develop intellectual and personal worth as well as practical skills? As we become ever more instrumental in our attitudes, affixing monetary profit and loss statements to every activity, we risk losing sight of the need to produce truly well-educated individuals who can adapt to the extremes of any technological climate and who have the skills (and perhaps even the wisdom) to become leaders in science, medicine or public affairs. (Jane Healy, Failure to Connect, p.106)
Future education should not merely mirror the society, but fashion selectively a special culture that will correct and complement society. Now, however, schools contract all the diseases of the larger world. The more learning merely reflects society, the less it can help improve it. (James Moffett, The Universal Schoolhouse, p.57)
“Education ought to provide society with people who are capable of doing new things, rather than repeating what other generations have done, and with people who can analyze and verify so that they do not readily accept available trends of thought.” (Robert Glasser, Director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center quoted in Crisis in the Classroom, p. 197)
When people ask for education they normally mean something more than mere training, something more than mere knowledge of facts, and something more than a mere diversion. Maybe they cannot themselves formulate precisely what they are looking for; but I think what they are really looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, more intelligible to them. When a thing is intelligible you have a sense of participation; when a thing is unintelligible you have a sense of estrangement. [E.F. Schumacher Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, p.77]
I’m troubled that modern educators have become so caught up in the world of standards, curriculum, assessment, discipline, management, budgets, politics and bureaucracy that they have lost the ability to see clearly the simple truth of the joy of learning as the crucial foundation stone for everything else in learning. (Thomas
Armstrong, Awakening Genius in the Classroom, p. vi)
High schools have long had three core tasks: to prepare young people for the world of work; to prepare them to use their minds well, to think deeply and in an informed way; and to prepare them to be thoughtful citizens and decent human beings. (Theodore and Nancy Sizer, The Student Are Watching, p. 10)
“These reforms express my deep belief in our public schools and their mission to build the mind and character of every child, from every background, in every part of America,” President Bush said during his first week in office in January 2001. (President Bush speaking about No Child Left Behind)
Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the
workplace and to compete in the global economy. From the Race to the Top website
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but no morals. … We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education. (Martin Luther King Jr., speech at Morehouse College, 1948)
The philosophy of the classroom of one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next. (Abraham Lincoln)
… public education does not serve a public; it creates a public. …The question is not, does or doesn’t public schooling create a public? The question is, what kind of public does it create? (Neil Postman, The End of Education, p. 18
One of the most difficult problems we face is to make it possible for young people to participate in the great tasks of their time. …We have designed our society in such a way that most of the possibilities open to young people today are either bookish or frivolous. (John Gardner, Self-Renewal, p.126).
So, what do you believe is the purpose of education? I look forward to your comments.
http://www.ascd.org/publications/newsletters/education-update/jul12/vol54/num07/What-Is-the-Purpose-of-Education%C2%A2.aspx
http://purposed.org.uk/