We must be clear as to the purposes of
education, understanding that the purpose of education as identified by
professors of education is impoverished and that most other definitions are
incomplete.
Professors of education typically identify the
purpose of education as the development of student “critical thinking skills” and
a propensity for “lifelong learning,” with “constructivist” curriculum driven
by student experience and interest, so that teachers become mere “facilitators.”
The purpose of education identified by
education professors is intellectually impoverished, a smokescreen for their
own intellectual lassitude and for the insufficient knowledge base of the
putative educators whom they produce.
Education reformers who work outside the
education establishment, in the world of private enterprise, identify the
purpose of education as preparation for the marketplace.
The purpose of education identified by
reformers from the world of private enterprise is insufficient.
……………………………………………………………………………………
The great purposes of education are cultural enrichment,
civic preparation, and professional
satisfaction.
Education is a matter of cultural enrichment:
The happy and fulfilled person is alive in the
world of knowledge. She or he can go to
a production of A Street Car Named Desire
or A Raisin in the Sun and have a
sense of the place that Tennessee Williams and Lorraine Hansberry occupy in the
realm of American drama. She can tune
into Cosmos and be alert rather than
lost as Neil Degrassey Tyson, the great popularizing successor to Carl Sagan,
traces the evolution of humankind from creatures who emerged from the sea and
adapted through natural selection to circumstances of the earthly terrain. He can continue to be animated by the musical
worlds of hip-hop, rhythm and blues, rock, and country, while still
appreciating the genius of Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin. She can understand how Sigmund Freud and B.
F. Skinner each challenged the assumption of free will--- and thus evaluate whether our approach to
criminal justice actually operates on sound principles of human behavior. The happy and fulfilled person has a sense of
her or his place in a world history that has known the Tang Dynasty, the
Togugawa shoguns, the emperors of Songhai, the mathematicians of the Maya, the
architects of Anghor Wat, the empires of the Mediterranean world and of
European ambition, the genius of a United States Constitution that nevertheless
required the responses of Frederick Douglass and A. Phillip Randolph and Gloria
Steinem.
Education is a matter of civic preparation:
People in the United States live in a nation
that is the envy of many people across the globe who yearn for democracy. And yet too many people in the United States
do not understand the electoral college system, how primaries differ from
caucuses, the constitutional principles that inform the debate between liberals
and strict constructionists, the roles of the House of Representatives and
Senate when considering a process that leads from impeachment through trial for
a president or other federal official accused of “gross crimes and
misdemeanors.” People who have no or
little knowledge of the organizational efforts of Sam Adams, Harriet Tubman,
Floyd McKissick, Bella Abzug, or Saul Alinsky have no appreciation of the power
that lies within themselves if they were to exercise their full rights of
citizenship.
Instruction in those features of history and
government that prepares a person for citizenship is a key component of the
purpose of education. The exercise of
citizenship animates a person for the pursuit of causes beyond the self. Understanding how one may act to advance
one’s own rights is important, and that is a part of civic preparation. But civic preparation also entails an
understanding of one’s own demographically defined group, how that group fits
into the body politic, and how the rights of the individual, particularistic
group, community, state, and nation fit into the complex weave of the
polity. When a person is given the
factual information necessary for embracing the responsibility of citizenship,
the chances are enhanced that a person’s civic responsibility will be exercised
both to enhance personal dignity and to promote human betterment in concentric
movement from the person all the way out to the nation as a whole.
And education is a matter of professional
satisfaction:
Possessed with a full stock of knowledge and
skill, the educated person goes forth to life as an economically productive
and prosperous citizen, with the ability to locate the work experience
consonant with the person’s life values, goals, and aspirations. When those whose origins are in families that
have been stuck in generational cyclical poverty become thus professionally
prosperous and fulfilled, generational poverty ceases and the cycle is terminated. Myriad social problems are curtailed and democracy
ensues for the first time in the history of the United States.
A person with a strong sense of self, a grasp
of the civic ethic, and dedication to the lives of people in the larger
community, is a person whose own purpose in life is multifaceted. She or he moves forth with a firmness of ego that
allows for altruistic commitment to the greater good.
Fulfilling the great purposes of K-12
education means citizens realizing their best selves and the citizenry collectively
becoming the democracy that we heretofore have only imagined ourselves to be.
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