The Value and Purpose of an Education
An editorial by Bruce M. Desmond, President of the Board of Aldermen

In the mid 1850’s, southerner William Harper wrote that it was pointless to educate the slaves since they work with their hands and will therefore never need an education. Today we face similar attitudes in terms of the education of the general populace. As a former teacher and as a parent, I have been confronted by both my own children and students (of all ages) who needed to know why they had to learn about a certain subject matter if it wasn’t going to benefit them financially.  “I’m never going to use this, so why should I have to know it?” is the common refrain. Why, indeed, is the question; but there are other questions such as: from where does this attitude come; how prevalent is it among students, teachers, administrators, and the general population?  Why should we learn anything if we are not going to use it in some way to make money or to fulfill our role as a cog on the economical wheel of corporate America? What is an education, and what is its value? Why do we need one?

       Those who embrace the notion that education serves no purpose other than to prepare a person for employment, give credence to the argument of southerner William Harper and the uselessness of educating a slave (or anyone else for that matter). They are the living testimony that our society has lost all sense of value and purpose of an education. Societies misunderstanding of what learning and understanding is all about has led us to the current state of affairs where we are turning our public schools into test preparation centers instead of centers of education and learning, while the majority of our school administrators and elected officials maintain that there is no difference between the two.  They tell us that to prepare for a test is to learn and understand.  Anyone who believes that training someone to memorize and regurgitate a litany of facts and figures for the purpose of passing a standardize test is an education, does not appreciate what an education really is or how one is attained or measured. These are the people who believe that your education is over when you receive a diploma or a degree of some sort, or that you even need a degree to be considered an educated person.  Abraham Lincoln would smile at such a pretentious attitude.  I am reminded of the scene in  “The Wizard of Oz” in which the scarecrow asks for a brain and is told by the Wizard that the world is run by people who have fewer brains than he, but they have one thing that he hasn’t got, at which point the Wizard pulls a piece of parchment out of his magic bag and presents it to the Scarecrow as a degree in “Thinkology”. At last the Scarecrow and everyone around him is satisfied that he has a brain.  As I look around and see the educational policies of our current State and Federal leaders (both elected and appointed), I suspect that they may have sorely missed the beautifully made point of L. Frank Baum.
         This is not to say that an education isn’t to be used to prepare for a career or a profession, but to think of it only in those terms is damaging to an enlightened society, for it trivializes   knowledge and eliminates the concepts of understanding and perspective. By making knowledge trivial and associating it with material gain, we have created a society that is shallow and base, a society where we only study to pass a test, or appear on a game show where questions concerning Michaelangelo are of equal importance as those concerning “ Gilligan’s Island”. But worse than that, we have institutionalized this attitude.  Our public schools and the institution of the family itself have willingly taken on and accepted this attitude toward education, and we use this “knowledge for materialism” concept to motivate our young to do their homework and get good grades.

          The purpose of an education is not for the acquisition of money. The purpose and value of an education is to empower the individual; to give a person understanding and perspective so that they may better deal with whatever is thrown their way. An education makes each of us better able to appreciate the life we’ve been given and the ability to pass that appreciation on to others. It allows us to listen to the people of the past, and gives us the ability to speak to the future. It grants us a wisdom that can be used in so many ways; it enables us to explain the difference between love and sex to our children; it gives us the common sense that lets us see what real wealth is; it provides us with an understanding of the genuine nature of things such as courage, integrity, friendship, honesty, ethics, human nature, good, evil, greed, generosity, truth, and so much more, even …our self, if we dare. The responsibility of a public school is not to provide all of this; it is to construct the foundation upon which all of this is built. It is to open the doors so that our children see.  It is to give some insight to “the road less traveled” as well as the one most traveled. For an education is not achieved by the time a person reaches the age of seventeen or eighteen as our diplomas might insinuate; it is a lifetime endeavor, it is a pursuit that ends only with our passing. This is why we rightly call our graduation ceremonies “commencements,” they are beginnings not ends.
         If this definition of education is dismissed by our leaders as being naive and idealistic, then we have our answer as to why public education seems to be failing., because if we are not approaching education with the attitude that I have described above, then everything that we teach is without its proper context, and is therefore labeled as irrelevant unless it leads to material success. This is the culture that we have created; it is a shallow, base, and self-centered world, where we rear our children to be selfish, where we teach them that success is the ability to satisfy all their appetites. A society where “greed is good,” where gluttony is accepted and expected. I am reminded of Neil Postman’s forward in his book “Amusing ourselves to Death” where he talks about Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” in which people came to love their oppressions, and adored the technologies that crippled their capacities to think. Postman reminds us that “Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one,” and that “ the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
          This Huxleyan world is not far off, and our current system of education reform is bringing us closer to it. The current direction of Mass Ed Reform is killing education, because it is narrowing the scope of our curriculums to only those things that are tested, killing the creativity of those great teachers who understand what education is all about but are ordered to teach to the test; it is destroying the curiosity of the students by making the process repetitive and tedious.
           A genuine education is what is needed; it is the only effective way to attempt to solve our social problems and to elevate our respect for or the human condition. An educated populace is the only hope we have of solving problems such as teen pregnancy, drug abuse, spousal abuse, poverty, bigotry, racism, violence, sexual abuse, and all the other problems that face our people. But in order to provide this type of education, our teachers must be allowed the opportunity to do so. The talent and art of teaching for the sake of providing perspective and understanding requires time and patience. Teachers cannot provide this type of pedagogy while they are at the same time being ordered to prepare our students for standardized tests.  It is time to move in a different direction.