Three purposes for education

If you live a median life in the UK then it is very likely that you will spend as much as a quarter of your life in education of one sort or another. That is a terrifyingly large amount of time for an individual, and perhaps even more so for a society.

Why do we do it? What is it all for? Are we spending all of that time and money and energy on the right kind of education? Indeed, what is the right kind of education and how would we know?

These are things that keep me up at night, so in an attempt to get some more sleep I thought I would attempt some answers. These are some of my first written thoughts on this matter, and I reserve the right to disavow them later.

Education should, I think, have three purposes:

Education for work

I will start with work as it is probably the oldest and most obvious purpose, and certainly the most hotly contested today.

Education for work, or perhaps more properly career development, whether at a young age or later in life, is about preparing people for a job and improving their abilities once they are in one. Exactly what needs to be taught is constantly changing as technology evolves and expectations change, but the basics include literacy and numeracy and transferable skills like teamwork and communication. On top of that there are skills and knowledge specific to a particular job or career path – engineering for engineers, painting for painters, and so on – which may be taught in the classroom, on the job, or just picked up along the way. Once someone is in a job then they may learn some new skills that will allow them to do a different one later on.

Work was likely the first reason that any kind of formal education was established. The medieval world had guilds to take you from apprentice to master craftsman, ancient civilisations had scribal schools, and perhaps our distant ancestors used cave paintings to teach mammoth hunting. Its most fervent proponents today see schools and universities as factories responsible for keeping the cogs of business turning and see curriculum alignment between industry and academia as crucial and usually accompanied by campaigns to teach more STEM subjects and fewer arts.

Better career education helps get people into jobs they enjoy, helps us better meet our daily needs, and helps us invent new technologies and better processes that allow us to achieve more and reach further as a species.

Education for citizenship

Closely related to career development is citizenship: the ability to be an independent citizen and a functioning member of modern society. Where education for work is about enabling you to do your job well, education for citizenship is about enabling you to interact with everyone else. It includes an understanding of the rules of our society and our political system, the numeracy required to make sense of taxes and salaries and loans, and enough geography to know how one’s community fits into a county, a country, and a continent. These are many of the same things that might be called ‘common sense’ or ‘cultural capital’.

The requirements for citizenship change more slowly than those for work; they are linked more closely to social movements than to technology. Many of these requirements are not formally taught but instead left for parents to cover or to be absorbed by osmosis as one grows up immersed in one’s own culture.

Media, and now especially social media, plays a very strong role here. I will expand on this another time, but much of what we know about the world beyond our own patch we learn by consuming media, and that makes it a fearsomely powerful tool for shaping society.

Good citizenship education bears fruit in a myriad of ways, many of which are represented by statistics like voting turnout, crime rates, and levels of personal debt. It is often a prerequisite to political representation as well as career advancement.

Education for transcendence

The purposes we have talked about so far are the practical ones that are necessary because we are members of a larger society. We are as Heidegger puts it, not just just beings but with-beings (mitseins), beings that must live and interact with others. The third and final purpose is a more personal one, and is in many ways the most important, it is the ability to transcend the mundane biological reality of being human, to not just to engage with society but to achieve some self-defined purpose within it.

For this I use Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of transcendence, the activity of changing, exploring, and growing, of being more than what we are. Though transcendence is in many ways personal and private, it is also that which produces the pinnacles of our civilisation, our poets and painters and scientists and scholars, our Beethovens and de Beauvoirs, our Angkor Wats and our Acropolises. When we teach people to write, to paint, to sing, to create, to imagine, to philosophise, these are skills that allow them to be transcendent, to express themselves, to find meaning, and to grapple with what it is to be.

Exercising transcendence requires not just education but also freedom, or, as Virginia Woolf puts it, ‘a room of one’s own’. For most of human history men have robbed women of both, and then used their lack of achievements as evidence that they never deserved either one. De Beauvoir wrote that ‘As long as [woman] still has to fight to become a human being, she cannot be a creator.’ and the same could be extended to other oppressed groups; peasants, slaves, the working classes, and many others have been deprived on the opportunity to do anything more with their lives than labour for their masters (though this has not stopped them trying).

Only the very wealthiest and most free have been able to afford to pursue transcendence for its own sake as gentleman scholars and aristocrat poets. That is not to say that others have not also pursued transcendence and gloriously so, only that they are rarer and the path for them has been more difficult.

Education for work is very easy to get support for; it is hard to argue against and it has clear benefits for everyone. Historically it has been by far the most widely provided (at least to men). Education for citizenship and transcendence on the other hand is a dangerous thing. Teach someone their rights and how to speak their mind and you provide them with the tools to foment revolution. Much of the reluctance to teach women skills for work has been grounded in the fact that many of those same skills can also be harnessed to the less palatable causes of citizenship and transcendence.

Education for all three purposes

Historically education as a whole has encompassed all three of these purposes, but it is only relatively recently that they have been combined and made available to all, at least in the developed world. A typical secondary school in the UK will teach its students not just reading, writing, and ’rithmetic, but also history, geography, art, music, sports, foreign languages, and more. About half of those students will go on to university, many studying subjects unrelated to their later careers.

This seems then to be a success for transcendence over careerism, a celebration of humanity and civilisation over labour and commerce. And yet, we also seem to be a society more of consumers than creators, and there is evidence of a growing mental health crisis, particularly among young people who feel overwhelmed by work and responsibilities and unable to express their humanity.

Businesses meanwhile complain that there are not enough skilled people to meet their needs, and a shocking number of adults manage to leave education lacking the basic literacy, numeracy, and digital skills without which they cannot hope to succeed in the modern world. The government’s response to these challenges has principally been not to critically examine education but rather to issue directives that defund and deprioritise the arts.

I do not think that this is the right approach. In fact I increasingly think that teaching for all three purposes at once and doing this almost entirely in childhood is doomed to failure from the outset. By trying to please everyone we please nobody and achieve much less than our potential.

It is, of course, possible to teach for more than one purpose at once – music gives musicians careers and also a way to express themselves, and learning statistics makes you both more employable and more able to understand the modern world – but very often these purposes are in tension with each other. Education for work likes clear goals, standardisation, and repeatability while education for transcendence requires freedom, innovation, and individuality. Getting your students to express themselves in ways that still score well in an exam is a very difficult tight-rope for even the most talented teachers to walk, let alone the students themselves.

Instead I am convinced that better approaches are possible, and that they are worth pursuing even if they are only marginal improvements. Education is so fundamental to our society and such a huge focus of our resources that even a small improvement can have a very big impact.

I do not yet know what these better approaches could look like, but I have some ideas that they might include a greater emphasis on lifelong learning, increased flexibility in our education pathways, and a move away from jobs requiring unnecessary qualifications. I hope to explore these further in future posts and I would welcome any thoughts from others.

J. Dudley