What’s the Purpose of Education?

The direction of the educational system looks a lot like a broken compass, pointing in lots of different and seemingly contradictory positions. We are constantly calling for new reforms, new measures and new policies to improve our schools but nothing seems to work. We are perplexed at the perpetual state of dysfunction and are regularly bombarded with new ideas. Each new idea falls short of our expectations and measures of success. We are left wondering, “what went wrong?”

Before we take another step into darkness of educational reform we need to first evaluate what the purpose of K-12 education is? This seems like a simple question (and many feel that it is) but the reality is that if you ask a teacher, student, parent, principal or politician there will be a very wide variety of answers.

Here are a few that are often given:

• Building character and life skills
• Readiness for the workplace
• Academic success
• Literacy and numeracy
• Social justice and reducing inequality
• Support for the economy

The problem of “purpose” becomes clearer as you look at reoccurring educational issues. School shootings, are we doing enough to support the mental health of our students? Test scores dropping on international standardized tests, how can we improve numeracy and literacy? Bullying, how do schools build character? Economy, why don’t we have enough trained professionals in this sector? Growing inequality gap, do our schools perpetuate inequality? The list goes on.

Each of these issues are important, valid and deserve the attention of our educational system but we can’t tackle them all at once in the disjointed, ill thought out approach we are currently employing. As a country we need to decide what we want from our schools and then build a plan based on that purpose. It seems simple and yet we choose not to do it.

**** If you have any comments or suggestions I would love to hear them as I try to improve my writing*******