A little on education

Prompted by a blog post elsewhere I've been thinking a bit about education. Pretty much everybody agrees that education is a good thing, and that it's important to educate people, but not so clear is what we want to accomplish with that education. What should people be taught, and why should they be taught it?

Here are a few popular (?) theories on why people should be educated:

1. We need an educated workforce to operate our economy, so people need to be educated in order to be productive workers.
2. Since we're a democracy, we need people to be well-informed in order to make wise decisions in their voting; people should be educated in order that they can be good citizens.
3. People need to understand the world in which they live, including how it works physically (science), its culture and history, etc. So they should be educated so they can understand how the world works.
4. People should be educated so that they have the appropriate knowledge and reactions for society to run smoothly.
5. People should be educated so that they can have opportunities to do those things that require an education if they want; since, e.g., mathematics is a prerequisite for certain vocations, so we should teach it to give people an opportunity to pursue those vocations.
6. Education is the path to power and prosperity and Good Jobs, so people should be educated in order to have a fair chance at those things.
7. It is just good, simpliciter, for people to know Certain Things which are being taught.
8. People should be educated because it leads them to some sort of spiritual-cum-philosophical growth.

There are more, of course, and most people (if they think about it at all) probably hold to several of these in mixture. Certainly most of these (except perhaps 7 and 8) are fairly uncontroversially true about education: that is, they are correct assessments of some role or outcome of education in our society. But none of them fully captures what the goal of education is.

A certain kind of cynic might say that whatever our professed goals, (4) serves as education's primary directive. Education is a tool for conformism. Well, it certainly does do that (often, anyway) -- but with someone who is certain that that is all it can ever be or that that ought to be one of its main goals I can have no further conversation.

Similarly I think that (1), (2), (5), and (6) (and to an extent (3) depending on its sense) are too much practical considerations to really capture what we want education to be. We are bound by charity and justice to at least try to give people what they need to do well, so I suppose these do form sufficient reasons for education, but they don't encompass everything. Yes, we want people to be able to do well at their job, to make good civic decisions, to have opportunities to do what they want, to not be shut off from advancement. But surely even if none of these were at stake we should still, all else equal, want people to be educated? Surely we should prefer people to understand arithmetic or read philosophy or what have you, even if (in some strange and faraway society) they would not need to?

I think that (7) gets a little closer, but begs the question a bit. Why, is it good for people to know those things, and why those things in particular and not others? (8), too, has some trouble -- at least it does not at all correspond to what we really do in modern education, close as it is to Plato's ideal. And at any rate (7) and (8) (and (3)) can easily become a sort of self-justification for high-brow "culture" and its perpetuation, especially if we just assume without justification what sorts of education really accomplish the goals.

Like any mathematician or philosopher, I think that in order to talk seriously about something, we should try to outline our assumptions (axioms, perhaps). If the theories above are unsatisfactory, that seems the only way to do better.

A. Knowledge, simply and in itself, is a good thing. It is not the greatest or highest good, and may be outweighed in some cases by the negative consequences of knowledge, but it is a simple good: that is, it is good in itself for people to know things, not just good because of some result that that state of affairs may bring about.

Of course knowledge is also instrumentally good:

B. Physical well-being is a good thing. Insofar as education provides for it, it is good.
C. Spiritual well-being is a good thing. Insofar as education leads to it, it is good.
D. Beauty is a good thing; so is exposure to and understanding of it. Insofar as education exposes people to it, it is good.

That is, education exists for the same reason as any other human institution ought to exist: for meeting people's physical needs, and so that people can have "the True, the Good, and the Beautiful". That is its purpose; this is why we ought to educate people.

So, what should we teach?

This is difficult, but the first thing to throw out is the notion that our guiding principle in education ought to be the purely practical use of the knowledge and skills imparted to the student. That would be focusing on the physical needs to the exclusion of the others. To be sure, we ought to teach people practical knowledge and skills, but we ought not to stop there. (My Latin professor remarked to me, tongue-in-cheek, that my decision to take a classics class was a decision to "finally get an education along with your training" at HMC. I'd like to think that my time at HMC, even in my mathematics classes, which relate to my future career, gave me some education as well as training, but the point is well made: there is a difference, and having the education in addition to the training is worthwhile.) Insofar as we think of education as practical training we perpetuate the notion that ordinary people shouldn't study "higher" mathematics, or literature, or philosophy, or art: it might be training for the intellectual elites, but it is superfluous for the average worker. This is no good, because there is a good reason for everyone to have exposure to and understanding of at least some of these topics, and it has nothing to do with the job they plan to hold.

Still, there is a lot to be said for teaching practical skills, not the least of which that those practical skills which one learns in school can be practical both for those jobs and for learning those things which give better access to "the true, the good, and the beautiful". We teach arithmetic, basic reading and writing, basic outlines of history, basic science -- and we used to teach languages, especially classical languages -- for these reasons. It is hard (understatement of the day) to appreciate the truth and beauty of the theories and theorems in mathematics without understanding arithmetic, besides the fact that most people are practically better off if they can add and subtract and multiply; you cannot read and appreciate literature without being able to read, besides the enormous practical importance of reading in our society.

But at some point we should actually teach those other things; those things which are not really practical for most people's jobs; those things which are good because they give access to the true, the good, and the beautiful. And we have to realize when we teach it that that is what we are doing. When we teach even calculus (which does have practical applications for many more ordinary people), we should be clear that it won't be practical for everyone, but that it can be good for those people who will never use it to know, because there is elegant truth and beauty in it: and so a primary goal should be to help people see that. When we teach literature, the focus should not be on that faux-practical aspect of knowing facts about the "greats" and understanding allusions, but we should focus on using the literature to bring out truths and moral thought and beauty. This might be hard. So much of our culture is against this sort of thing: it thinks that the practical is what is important, the rest is a waste of time (fun, or boring, but a waste of time). We have to have the courage to counter that assumption, because it is so very wrong.

I cannot stop without making some comment on religious education; specifically, Christian education. It is in some sense even more important. For of course from the Christian point of view, no matter how good your secular education is, no matter how much you give to people tastes of truth and goodness and beauty, it cannot be sufficient. The most secularly-enlightened soul is still damned if it rejects God. But I think that a good Christian education can be thought of in similar terms to a good secular education. There are practical matters (such as particulars of habit and behavior) which of course cannot be ignored, but it is important to remember that there is more good to be had than that. For in the Christian view, God Himself is the epitome of Truth and Goodness and Beauty, and contains them all within Him -- and I think that a good Christian education, in addition to the many practical matters, should really teach us how to see that. Not that many of us are truly in a position to be good teachers of that (I certainly am not). But after all it is God who provides most of the education; we can at least do our best.