What (and why) is Education?
This post is a part of the Intask to Education series where I’m exploring the changing relationship between education and work. You can read the first post here.
After publishing my last post, I realized I was in way over my head.
I thought I understood education’s problem. I had read a few books, listened to some podcasts, talked with businesses and educators, but I was far from thinking critically about why education exists as it does in 2018. I had also blindly accepted some of the dogmatic mantras counter to institutionalized education that I mentioned in the last post without seeking the data to back them up.
While not perfect, I want to publish my thinking and iterate from feedback. If you have any feedback or criticism, please leave your thoughts below or via Twitter.
Defining Education
If you Google “education”, you find a variety in its definition. Here are a few.
Oxford English Dictionary: The process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university.
I don’t like how “instruction” is pretty vague in and of itself.
Merriam-Webster: The action or process of educating or of being educated.
I don’t like this definition either. My english teachers would rarely let me a define a word by including its etymological base.
Dictionary.com: The act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.
I’m not convinced the goal of education is to prepare oneself intellectually for mature life. What is a “mature” life, anyway?
Wikipedia: The process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits.
My english teachers would also scoff at me citing Wikipedia to define something, but I think Wikipedia has a pretty great definition.
A few similarities quickly rise from the above definitions.
First, education is a process. Education inherently includes a systematic approach or established process.
Second, I believe that pure, unadulterated education’s goal is learning. “Learning” itself can be applied pretty broadly — as Wikipedia puts it, learning is “acquiring new knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits.”
With that said, for the entirety of this project, I’ll define education as “a systematic approach to learning”.
Where does education occur?
Society often incorrectly refers to “institutionalized education” and “education” as synonymous.
The former (“institutionalized education”) occurs in institutions — public schools, universities, trade schools, or any other broadly-accepted institution. The latter (“education”) happens everywhere. Formal or informal systems of learning exist alongside autodidacts, families, small communities, business, and organizations.
For the rest of this project, I’ll focus on the colloquial interpretation of “last-mile” education, i.e. institutionalized education that directly precedes entering the workforce.
Depending on the individual, one’s “last-mile” of institutionalized education may be high school, trade school, community college, university, or a range of rising models that I’ll explore later in this series.
What’s the purpose of institutionalized, last-mile education?
People have defined the purpose of institutionalized education differently over time.
While the following excerpts might not directly refer to institutionalized, last-mile education, they do refer to institutionalized education. In my opinion, last-mile education inherently puts more weight on society’s economic needs.
“The purpose of education has always been to every one, in essence, the same — to give the young the things they need in order to develop in an orderly, sequential way into members of society. This was the purpose of the education given to a little aboriginal in the Australian bush before the coming of the white man. It was the purpose of the education of youth in the golden age of Athens. It is the purpose of education today, whether this education goes on in a one-room school in the mountains of Tennessee or in the most advanced, progressive school in a radical community. But to develop into a member of society in the Australian bush had nothing in common with developing into a member of society in ancient Greece, and still less with what is needed today. Any education is, in its forms and methods, an outgrowth of the needs of the society in which it exists.”
— John Dewey, “Individual Psychology and Education,” The Philosopher, 12, 1934
“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but no morals. … We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., speech at Morehouse College, 1948
“The main purpose of the American school is to provide for the fullest possible development of each learner for living morally, creatively, and productively in a democratic society.”
— The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) Committee on Platform of Beliefs, Educational Leadership, January 1957
“The purpose of education] has changed from that of producing a literate society to that of producing a learning society.”
— Margaret Ammons, Associate Secretary of ASCD, “Purpose and Program: How Does Commitment Today Differ from That in Other Periods,” Educational Leadership, October 1964
“The one continuing purpose of education, since ancient times, has been to bring people to as full a realization as possible of what it is to be a human being. Other statements of educational purpose have also been widely accepted: to develop the intellect, to serve social needs, to contribute to the economy, to create an effective work force, to prepare students for a job or career, to promote a particular social or political system. These purposes offered are undesirably limited in scope, and in some instances they conflict with the broad purpose I have indicated; they imply a distorted human existence. The broader humanistic purpose includes all of them, and goes beyond them, for it seeks to encompass all the dimensions of human experience.”
— Arthur W. Foshay, “The Curriculum Matrix: Transcendence and Mathematics,” Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 1991
While some definitions above border the philosophical, it’s clear that institutionalized education’s primary purpose is shaping individuals to meet the demands of a society in which it exists, rather than the purpose of catalyzing learning.
In other words, learning is just a positive externality of the institutionalized education process.
What are the demands of society today?
Society’s demands on we shape individuals are multifaceted; society’s demands are economic, idealistic, religious, scientific, political, cultural, patriotic, and driven by a variety of factors.
I want to focus on society’s economic demands. I argue society’s economic demands are currently the most critical because they react the quickest to real-time market dynamics, which evolve alongside the advances in technology. On the other hand, religions, sciences, politics, and cultures are shaped by slower evolving societal ideas and beliefs.
Society’s predominant economic system, capitalism, drives its economic demands on how institutionalized education shapes individuals. Cambridge’s dictionary defines capitalism as “an economic system based on private ownership of property and business with the goal of making the greatest possible profits for the owners.”
Thus, the economic demand for institutionalized education is to empower private owners of property — business, organizations, and individuals — to make the greatest possible profits. Accordingly, in order to maximize profit, institutionalized education should help private owners of property businesses increase the amount of money they earn (revenue) and decrease the amount of money they spend (expenses).
In the industrialized economy, the primary functions of revenue and expenses were driven by raw materials, physical goods, and physical labour. Consequently, society’s economic demands necessitated individuals who could accomplish physical labour most efficiently. As the industrialized economy boomed and specialized, society’s economic demands necessitated specialized physical labor, increasing amounts of mental labor, and increasing number of mechanisms to efficiently coordinate labor allocation in the market.
However, technological advances are shifting our industrialized economy into what some expert economists call a “digital” or “information” economy. Consequently, society’s revenue and expenses are decreasingly functions of private ownership of physical goods and materials and increasingly functions of intangibles — private ownership of data, intangible goods and processes, and mental labor.
In the rest of this publication, I’ll explore rising institutionalized education models that hope to better meet these demands of the digital economy.
Wes Wagner is a startup and Spanish enthusiast, B2B SaaS marketer, future-of-work fanatic, and student. He currently works at Cheddar, a billing SaaS platform built for developers, where he focuses on the startup’s content and analytics.
This publication is part of Wes’s undergraduate honors thesis at the Kelley School of Business.
