Core Principles

The Purpose of Education is Preparation for Citizenship in a Democracy

It is amazing how rarely the debate raging in America over education touches on the question of purpose. I suspect that part of the explanation is that many people in positions of power would prefer not to address the fact that education has been turned from its original purpose of serving democracy and instead now serves the perceived needs of the economy. We can only speculate why this is the case. In any event, the most widespread conception of the purpose of education is job training. That is the perception that I held right up through most of my college education, and it is not only the position of those in power, but by necessity is the position of the majority of Americans. Nevertheless, they are wrong. And so was I.

The best statement I've found on the true purpose of education comes from a classical scholar, the late Bernard Knox, in his essay, The Walls of Thebes. The entire essay is richly rewarding, but I will quote from his conclusion:

[That] group of studies we call the humanities came into being as an education for democracy, a training in free citizenship; all through its long history it has been the advocate of free thought and speech; it has flourished most brilliantly wherever those freedoms were respected and faced repression and banishment wherever they were not.  And this is the strongest argument for the humanities today.  Not that they will lead to positions of emolument--it is no longer true and was an ignoble argument to start with; not that they will make the individual life a richer, deeper experience—though this is true; but that they will prepare the young mind for the momentous choices, the critical decisions which face our world today. (1993, 105)

Knox goes on to make a distinction crucial to any serious discussion of education:

"The Greeks relegated practical skills, techne, to a lower sphere; the ideal of a free man was leisure, schole, and the pursuit of wisdom which it permitted."

There are two important ideas in Knox's conclusion. The first is that the purpose of education is preparing young minds for self-governance. The second is that the proper form of education to accomplish this is the humanities, as traditionally conceived.

Education is a Human Activity

Except perhaps for some rather trivial tasks, education must have human activity at its center. The extensive use of computers for teaching is a continuation of the same process that has seen people replaced by machines in numerous other activities, including farming. The notion that education is a drudgery that people can be "freed" from to pursue more important or pleasurable activities is a tragic mistake. It isn't healthy or effective for students to be sat in front of a screen to be taught by a software program or a video.

I will acknowledge that software and video can accomplish some learning tasks. This doesn't mean that they are the best way of doing so. Determining what is best will involve thinking of our values, and reckoning things which can't be quantified. We can't allow those who stand to make a killing selling us machines and services set the terms for this reckoning. Those of us who want to be the humans at the center of this activity must learn to conduct ourselves in such a way that we can demonstrate a clear advantage to our being there.