As we know, other aspects of education are endlessly analyzed and debated. But what is the purpose of education?
Of course, there are many answers being given. They are, however, usually implied rather than explicitly stated: perhaps people give these answers without even realizing that they are giving them.
Clearly stated, or more often merely implicit, these goals are offered: education should make students effective and able participants in a democratic system; education should be job training; secondary education should be focused on preparing students for college or university; education should develop ethical or moral thinking; education should teach life skills like nutrition and hygiene; etc. The list is diverse and endless.
With such a large and divergent set of potential goals, the construction of a coherent educational system is unlikely.
This is entailed by the nature of public education. Private education has the luxury of clearly articulating some goals, which by implication excludes other goals.
Bernard Iddings Bell, discussing a monograph about education by Mortimer Smith, writes:
Mr. Smith ends this admirable essay with a question. "We have been going on," he says, "for some time on the theory that education consists simply of experience and change and 'growth’ … Perhaps we need to set up some ends for education; perhaps we need to ask "growth for what?" He knows, of course, that there is no "perhaps" about it. Our professors of education, our administrators, our school boards, teachers whom they train and employ, avoid inquiry about purpose as they would avoid the plague - purpose in life, in labor, in thought, in love, in citizenship, in anything, even in education itself. Why? Because to ask about the “why” of things is both personally disturbing and disruptive of whatever static social patterns happen to be. To ask “why” might result in teachers remaining human beings and children becoming human beings, both given to making embarrassing inquiries instead of being content to be placid tools for production and consumption of goods, complacent believers in whatever those who happen to wield social control tell them is the truth. Men who ask “why” are necessary, to be sure, for the survival of freedom and democracy. But who nowadays wishes a free state at the price of possible discomfort? Who for democracy is willing to run the risk of questioning closely those flattering demagogues who pleasingly blarney the electorate and who give much in bread and circuses? Certainly not the rank and file of hard-headed Americans.
The desire for moral and ethical thought as a goal in the educational system has repeatedly found new homes, moving back and forth between the Left and the Right, between the social liberals and the social conservatives.
Each has items which it wants declared ‘good’ or ‘evil’ - whether it’s tobacco or condoms, whether it’s tolerance of specific sexual practices or tolerance of free market enterprise, whether it’s the inclusion or exclusion of spiritual thought in public discourse, etc.
While they view each other as opposites, they have this in common: at some level, their goals for education obtain a moral hue.
Mortimer Smith indicates those both sides find themselves perpetually disappointed:
Under the guidance of “the scientific spirit” modern education cannot but fail to give young people a knowledge of good and evil, for to the social scientist these are relative terms. The student is taught to believe that goodness is what “works out” something that brings “beneficent fruits in social and personal life,” without defining any standard of beneficence; “standards” and “values” are to the modern educator prescientific, theological terms. It is precisely this attitude that produces in the student that sinister lack of individual moral freedom which Lafcadio Hearn declared was the result of Japanese education, which, as he pointed out, has always been an education based on social cohesion. By fostering this attitude in the student he will never know whether we're right and Hitler wrong; he will never develop any value-system by which to judge the intrinsic worth of anything. At best this kind of education will produce only clever, wary animals who have learned how to keep out of trouble.
Smith’s discovery is that, while the charge of ‘relativism’ is often perceived to be a charge leveled by the Right against the Left, it is in fact an accusation which the Left, in its own way, also makes against the Right.
As long as the electorate has significant influence on educational policy - as long as those who oversee education, whether they be local school boards or state legislatures - are directly elected, the question of the goals and objectives of public education will remain an unsettled one.
[Andrew Smith is a German teacher at Huron High School and at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. These writings constitute a mere exercise and are not to be taken as a definitive statement of his views.]
