What is the Purpose of Education?

One of my favorite books is Prisoners of the Paradigm by Alan Hafer. A particular quote in the book continues to resonate in my mind. Hafer states "The ultimate dilemma in American public education, the genesis of all others, is simply that no one really knows what schooling is supposed to accomplish. It is not just a question of what content should be taught. The issue is much broader. Americans have not yet decided for what purpose public education exists and until purpose is agreed on, correcting the system remains impossible. Without an agreed-on end there can be no measure of success; there can be no progress because there is no goal."

Stop and consider that statement for a moment, if you asked ten friends what the purpose of public education is, you would more than likely get ten different answers. This inability to specifically state a common purpose of education is a fairly recent phenomenon. The native North American cultures used oral histories to indoctrinate their youth for the purpose of continuing their culture, customs, beliefs, fears and hopes. When they taught their progeny how to hunt and grow crops, it was for the survival of the people. Similar systems of education can be found in the ancient cultures of each inhabited continent. In order for a civilization to survive, new members needed to be taught how to live so that future generations could prosper. The earliest education systems in the American colonies were created so that children could learn to read the Bible. Locals paid taxes to support the local schools so that the children would learn how to live in the same manner that the elders lived.

Fast forward to today, where society is much more complex and schools are expected to teach much more than reading. Physical education, art, music, math, science and history are part of almost every school district in Illinois (interesting fact: Illinois is the only state that requires daily physical education). Local curricula are adopted and many different measures are taken to ensure that students are progressing through the curricula...but for what purpose? At Lake Bluff Elementary, we keep our collective eye on making certain our students are prepared for Lake Forest High School. Lake Forest High School works to prepare its students for college. College is intended to prepare students to be productive tax paying members of society. How each system sets about doing its daily work is as varied as the stars.

Recently, there has been a push to create a national curriculum, but who will take on that task? Who is going to decide what every single student in a country of almost 300 million people is going to learn? Our nation has a rich history of allowing for local control. Local school districts get to decide what its students will learn. But that paradigm is beginning to change. There is a great fear that India and China are soaring past the USA in terms of educational achievements. Out of that fear, No Child Left Behind was created in 2001. For the past decade, we have walked down a path of assuming all students are the same throughout the state and country. If you are a parent that has more than one child, you already know that no two children are identical. Different instructional strategies work for different children. Different children have disparate interests and strengths. To propose that all students should be taught the same information in the same manner and all will produce identical results is ludicrous. So we are left with the endeavor to create a rich academic experience for all children while still attempting to appease the federal government by assessing each child's progress as if it occurred in a vacuum.

We still haven't decided what education is for, and until there is a nation-wide consensus on that issue, assessing its collective success is arbitrary, at best. And at worst it is damaging to the growth of each individual.