The Purpose of Education
A High School Junior’s Musing
To start off, let me tell you a fascinating story, “The Allegory of the Cave” from Plato’s Republic and its relation to the purpose of education. In the Allegory, there are prisoners chained and fixated (unable to move) in a cave. They have spent all their lives there, and their reality has been limited to shadows of the real world. One day, someone frees a prisoner, and for the first time, the prisoner turns his head and ventures out of the cave into the real world.
Blinded at first by the sun’s rays, he soon realizes that his reality of shadows was an illusion. He ventures back down into the cave, becomes blinded again due to the darkness, and notifies the remaining prisoners of what he had seen. But upon hearing this, the other prisoners kill him because they think he has become delusional. [1]
The author, Plato, believed that the purpose of education was to help guide us as demonstrated in the story, “the turning of the head” and the “freeing of the prisoner,” in flourishing by being our best selves. Education was supposed to free us from the chains of society, from the propaganda, lies, and corruption.
Is education still fulfilling this purpose? No.
Education is putting light into “blind eyes,” the point where the prisoner does not receive any useful information and is still ignorant. Most present-day education in the United States has failed our children and us.
Let us continue with how education changed overtime, first beginning in the Middle Ages in Europe. Then, I will jump to the United States and talk about the Industrial Revolutions and end in present day.
From 476 to 1453
In the Middle Ages, there were different types of education: Non-Academic and Academic. Non-Academic (now modernly called Vocational) education consisted of an apprenticeship and developing a trade. Academic education for those that could afford it such as those for peasants meant learning basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. For those that followed a scholarly academic education, they were taught the “Trivium and Quadrivium.” [2&3] In the Trivium, children learned primarily three main things: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. In the Quadrivium, they learned about the many different subjects.
The purpose of the vocational education was to produce people with specialized trades while the purpose of those following a scholarly academic education was to produce logical people who could express themselves.
Mass forms of education were nonexistent until the period of the First Industrial Revolution.
From 1790s to 1890s
During the time of the first two Industrial Revolutions, there were again, two types of education: Vocational and Academic. Vocational education was for teaching laborers how to perform their jobs. Commonly in a factory setting, workers would be shown a process, say in this case, building a car. A team of engineers would demonstrate the steps of putting the wheels on, applying paint, and the workers would imitate the process, hoping to be able to recreate the work of professionals.
Academic education usually was to provide basic literacy to children working in factories.
During the first Industrial Revolution, immigrants such as the Irish and Germans arrived in large numbers, resulting in education turning into teaching “recitation literacy” and writing oral messages into written ones. It was not until the mid to late 1800s that… school children began to be asked to compose their own written texts.” [4]
From 1900s to 1930s
By the end of the Industrial Revolutions and beginning the Progressive Era, the factory model of education was created.
Quoting from How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School by the National Academies Press and United States National Academy of Sciences…
“Mass education was seen by many as analogous to mass production in factories. School administrators were eager to make use of the ‘scientific’ organization of factories to structure efficient classrooms. Children were regarded as raw materials to be efficiently processed by technical works (the teachers) to reach the end product. This approach attempted to sort the raw materials (the children) so that they could be treated somewhat as an assembly line. Teachers were viewed as workers whose job was to carry out directives from their superiors- the efficiency experts of schooling (administrators and researchers). The emulation of factory efficiency fostered the development of standardized tests for measurement of the ‘product,’ of clerical work by teachers to keep records of costs and progress (often at the expense of teaching), and of ‘management’ of teaching by central district authorities who had little knowledge of educational practice of philosophy. In short, the factory model affected the design of curriculum, instruction, and assessment in school.” [4]
This system creates many problems that I will go in depth later.
From 1930s to Current Day
Expressive writing and critical analysis begun to emerge during this time period. [4]
After the creation of the factory model, there have been other types of movements such as the Classical movement, the Standards (Progressive Education) movement, and the Grassroots movement. The current system that came out on top was the Standards Movement which is the modern day version of the factory model.
This movement was fueled by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) standardized tests in mathematics, reading, and science. When the United States were outranked terribly on the PISA scores, this resulted in the incentive to improve schools through standards and testing. Some examples of this include No Child Left Behind and later, Every Student Succeeds Act. [5]
These reforms hurt public education and our children. As Sir Ken Robinson, Creativity and Educational Expert says,
“There were small group of winners and they did very well [in the system], but the vast majority didn’t. And part of the problem, as I see it, is that the system of education is burdened with certain ideological assumptions. One of them is a whole set of ideas like intelligence.” [6]
The purpose of education in the factory model was to produce workers capable of their jobs.
What the Purpose of Education Should be
Although there was a shift in the purpose of education from one that was simply copying to one that included critical analysis, like in the age of the Industrial Revolution, students, not factory workers, are fundamentally going through the same process to copy other skills except with different subjects such as math, science, etc. A teacher would show you how to use an equation, and you would practice it. Children are shepherded by age and are run through the same mechanical process of learning, copying.
This creates a variety of problems. Not everyone learns the same way; that is to say not one way of teaching will apply to all. Not everyone learns at the same pace. Not everyone wants to learn the same thing.
The standardized testing put into place isn’t helpful either for reasons I will go into another article.
Education isn’t supposed to be only a job training experience. Usually creating an education system tailored to work skills was to help one survive and fend for themselves which in turn would help the “survival of the [human race]” as Mr. Beat, an AP Government, Economic, and AP US History teacher says. Our model was built on creating stability– the survival of the human race. It isn’t entirely wrong, but there is more to education than developing work skills.
The purpose of education has transcended. Our system created the ability to move economically. None of the previous systems had such movement in place. In the Industrial Revolution, laborers stayed in their class. In the Medieval Age, peasants stayed peasants. So, on so forth.
In our era, the students will become successors.
This is what our founding fathers and mothers built America on, the American Dream. Education has been morphed into this dream, resembling equal opportunity and freedom. It allowed anyone to advance the system. But it isn’t doing it anymore and has failed millions. Changing our system is more than bettering education but vital to the preservation of our country culturally and economically.
In the growing age of technology, it is important to acknowledge that new times require different skills and methods. We do not need people who can only mindlessly follow steps as it is being replaced by machines. The need goes beyond that. We need people who are creative, who can communicate, who are innovative. This is the era of information, and evidently how education is set up needs to be changed.
There are six core purposes of education.
The first one is to create socially responsible citizens. For the past hundred years, humans have devastated the environment and created countless social problems. Some examples of this include the plastic waste in the oceans, deforestation, climate change, oppression of the minorities, corruption in the government, etc. We need to be civic in our education. In other words, we need to clearly present today’s problems to our students and empower and equip them with the tools to solve our problems.
In our current educational system, there is too much emphasis on the individual and what the students want to do. Unfortunately, there must be a balance between what society needs and what the student wants. We must also remind our students that there are problems in the world to be fixed.
The second one is to create democratic citizens. Our students need to know how our government is run and politics. Some may say that discussing politics creates polarized groups, but discussing politics should not be a verbal fight. We aren’t trying to give reasons for which party is better. We discuss what is best for the nation. We analyze the cause and effects of our actions. Stigmatizing talking about “politics” separates the citizen from their own government which is the opposite of democracy.
The third one is to help students flourish in their passions and talents. We want to acknowledge their talents and choices, and build our students.
The fourth one is to help students prepare for the workforce. This includes creating entrepreneurial flair and learning about how to earn and manage money.
The fifth one is to help students learn and think for themselves which is called “metacognition, the ability to monitor one’s current level of understanding… recognize the limits of one’s current knowledge, [and]… take steps to remedy the situation…” [4] In other words, education should help students develop the ability to learn independently. It should create logical and decisive students who can lead their own lives.
The sixth one is to help foster student’s virtue. In other words, fostering good character traits such as kindness, honesty, curiosity, courageousness, etc.
SOURCES:
- Plato’ s Republic. Clarendon, 1894.
- Sayers, Dorothy L. The Lost Tools of Learning. GLH Publishing, 2017.
- Snell, Melissa. “Schooling, University, and Apprenticeship in the Middle Ages.” ThoughtCo, ThoughtCo, 25 Feb. 2019, www.thoughtco.com/medieval-child-the-learning-years-1789122.
- Bransford, John D. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. National Acad. Press, 2004.
- Robinson, Ken, and Lou Aronica. Creative Schools: the Grassroots Revolution Thats Transforming Education. Penguin Books, 2016.
- Sadhguru and Ken Robinson, directors. “The Ideal Education” — Sir Ken Robinson with Sadhguru. Youtube, Sadhguru, 6 Mar. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAaWZTFRP9Q.
Note: This was a repost to change the URL/ Title of the article. Thanks for the understanding.
