The Three Great Purposes of an Excellent K-12 Education That Must Be Clearly Understood in Overhauling Curriculum and Teaching at the Minneapolis Pubic Schools

Verbiage traverses the ether these days in pursuit of valuation for higher education.

 

The verbiage and the valuation most often travel along a philistine course understandable in the context of our crass society but lamentable with regard to life’s meaning and the pursuit of happiness.

 

Understand, then, that the three great purposes of an excellent education, beginning at K-12 and extending to the collegiate and university levels, are cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.

 

The meaning of life is to render service to other human beings.

 

Happiness flows from living meaningfully as one ascends the hierarchy of biological imperatives, personal security, and higher-order concerns. 

 

Once one is thriving in a personal universe that includes loving relationships and a strong spiritual core, she or he moves confidently in the world, attentive to those higher-order concerns that yield meaning.

 

Service to other human beings is an ongoing commitment that crosses into many realms of human experience.  Fully rendered service necessitates response to many people, practical circumstances, and cultural contexts.  Service rendered in all situations for which opportunity exists necessitates broad and deep knowledge of history, economics, psychology, religion, literature, fine arts, mathematics, natural science, technology, and the manual arts.

 

Knowledge necessary for wide-ranging service to others also abets the cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that provide maximum personal fulfillment on this one earthly sojourn.  With broad and deep knowledge, one moves confidently in any situation, converses easily on many topics, interacts sensitively with people of many ethnicities, and experiences the joy of high-quality art, music, and literature of many genres and styles.  Knowledge is in constant dialectic with meaning and happiness:   Knowledge, meaning, and happiness assume, suffuse, and enrich each other.

 

Education is vital to this dialectic.

 

We have only one earthly sojourn as far as we know or, following Buddhists and Hindus and Jains, hope that this earthly sojourn finds us at the height of our humanity on the last turn of the Wheel of Existence.  From either perspective, we should want to be at our best, to live life at its fullest---  culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied.  

 

Education, then, is of value far beyond any economic yield.  The economic yield is likely;  professional satisfaction is one of the purposes.  The knowledge-intensity that defines an excellent education maximizes the likelihood of professional satisfaction and results concomitantly in the culturally enriched life positioned to be of maximum service to other citizens.

 

Thus, knowledge participates in another dialectic, assuming, suffusing, and enriching the cultural, civic, and professional life of one who is inexorably gaining new higher-order knowledge.

 

Enlightened cost-benefit analysis of a college education depends on a consideration of cultural, civic, and professional benefits and considers the cost of failing to provide an excellent education.  If only professional benefit is considered, the analysis is limited by the crass values that presently pervade our society.   

 

The impartation of a knowledge-intensive education to people of all demographic descriptors is the foundation for true democracy and enlightened society.

 

The three great purposes of a knowledge intensive education of excellence are cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.

 

My daily effort is to model the impartation of such an education and to induce decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools to extrapolate the modeled principles for application to the overhaul of  curriculum and teaching in this iteration of the local school district.