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Does education have a purpose? Is K-12 education just a habit we’ve been in for so long that we do it with no real purpose in mind? Of course not…so what is the purpose of education? This isn’t one of those questions with an easy answer, like “42” but it’s a question whose answer bears exploring if only to inform the conversation about whether or not our education system is working.
From the earliest days of the Republic, education has been equated with freedom. Thomas Jefferson minced no words and warned that people who are ignorant cannot expect to be free, specifically free from government tyranny. He even warned that public ignorance would make the nation vulnerable to foreign governments. Let THAT sink in for a minute…
The solution, according to Jefferson, is a population educated enough to be able to guide the government and safeguard liberty. There you have it, from the pen of a founding father.
He charged the government with providing a minimum education for *everyone* (bless his heart, we know he didn’t mean EVERYONE, but I like to think he’d approve of our modern definition) with the understanding that some people would pursue a higher level of education as fit their station in life.
That minimum education would prepare everyone to participate in the governing of the new nation by giving them the tools necessary to oversee the government… read newspapers to keep up with what the government is doing, critically evaluate issues on a ballot, have a conversation with others with similar (or, ideally, dissimilar) interests.
Central to good guardianship of our liberty, in Jefferson’s opinion, was the ability to oversee the government and that meant (and still means) being a critical consumer of the media. The media are a commercial venture, so they strive to meet the desires of the market. They are not an altruistic industry designed to serve the needs of the Republic by accurately and impartially reporting the doings of the government, so it is the responsibility of the public to a) demand quality of their product and b) consume critically. That means we must think critically about information that we receive, no matter the source. Enough said.
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There are habits of mind that people who are critical thinkers and problem-solvers have, and ‘being educated’ should involve< them too. Here’s a list and here’s the pedagogy. You’ll recognize some of your own habits here, but they are not innate education helps you develop them and encourages you to use them. Using them when you ‘read a newspaper’ (get information from any medium) is your RESPONSIBILITY as an educated citizen. They are the habits in your thinking that make you compare cost per unit when you go grocery shopping, that make you look for more information when you hear something crazy on talk radio, that keeps that nagging problem on your mind until you figure out the answer. They are what keep you from being a mindless cog in the machine, and that makes you a good citizen and a worthy steward of our freedom. You develop those habits by tackling hard math problems, by learning that there are other people in the world with different cultures, by memorizing atomic numbers and deciphering Shakespeare.
Sure, there are economic motivations available if you need them to justify education…there’s a direct link between GDP and literacy rate, so it’s in the best interest of our economy to have an educated population. And more education means more choices, so people who want to maximize opportunities in their lives can do so by pursuing more education.
But make no mistake about it: The very fate of the Republic depends on education. It’s all well and good to want to produce ‘citizens of the world’ but our purpose is to ‘secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity’ and to do that we must be educated.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Though Thomas Jefferson was seen during his time as a progressive regarding public education, let’s not forget his faults. This is his text, in part, written in 1782 in the context of a bill on education in his state of Virginia: “Of the boys thus sent in any one year, trial is to be made at the grammar schools one or two years, and the best genius of the whole selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed at the public… Read more »
So what was the motivation to educate people in countries where there wasn’t the least bit of interest in having them hold the government to account?
I stumbled onto your article, well said. I am currently working with a group of founders to open a new charter school in our community. In the process of writing our petition we were required to define what we believed the definition of an educated person in the 21st century meant. And as you noted, this isn’t a simple question with a simple answer. One of the best definitions we found actually didn’t relate to the “21st century” – I imagine you have seen it, but just in case… Master William Cory, a professor at Easton College in the late… Read more »