What’s at stake in education? The liberal socialist will probably get quite hot under the collar about the idea that you might need an education to have a fulfilled life. Anyone suggesting that to be educated is to be better will be stoned for the dread sin ‘elitism’. This is a quintessentially self defeating attitude which prefers a wrong-headed theoretical principle over self-evident real benefit.
Education is our primary means for shaping society, in a liberal and empowering sense. What’s at stake here is the degree of success and fulfilment we can achieve as a society and thus as individuals – constrained by the capacity and the base level achievements of the society we live within.
There’s no question that you can be a happy and fulfilled individual without the slightest hint of education. Of course a little reading helps to read signposts and important information but that’s more of requirement driven by social norms than an ontological truth.
So what is the point of education? What do you get, that you otherwise wouldn’t have or more to the point what can you do? Remember that I am specifically addressing education in any form and of whatever human quality, not the native intelligence of whatever sort (emotional, academic etc.).
While doing some recent work ended up asking people about their experience of education. The almost universal view was that you get qualifications, which give you the points to get through a competitive CV review stage to actually be seen in an job interview. That’s all. From the interview and forward into a job, it is then all about personal qualities and experience that were never taught in a classroom.
That’s pretty damning. It implies a massive waste of a very chunky part of your vital and precious formative years. So if what we actually get is a disappointing waste of vital years in our life, what should we be getting? The details of what people will state they want will change with environmental and personal circumstances. In the pushy eighties everyone wanted a power-job, in the noughties work-life balance grew in popularity, a pretty straight-forward reaction to excess.
Underneath this there is a universal and constant desire for security, esteem and self actualisation. Equipping ourselves to achieve these ought to be the purpose of education.
The realities of our current situation are complicated by social class issues. Esteem and self actualisation can be achieved by going to the right school, getting the right degree which together provide a passport for the right job – which comes with esteem and sufficient seniority to allow some sense of self actualisation. These are all driven not by the content of the education, but by the social attributes given to particular schools and their relation to social sets.
Knowledge in itself can get us none of these things, unless esteem is determined by success in a quizz. The skill of study or of preparing for and passing exams has only limited value. Only within the very narrow and artificial setting of the school itself can these offer esteem or an opportunity for self actualisation. Indeed in later life the habits learnt to succeed in exams can become a liability.
In normal society it is easy to see that security can best be secured by a positive, active, problem solving and warmly social attitude. Esteem can best be won by learning to be a team player, to lead when leadership is needed, to work and deliver when delivery is needed, to learn the art of judging the mood and modifying your own approach appropriately. Self actualisation is hard won so the best preparation for it is a combination of experiencing the immense satisfaction that can be derived from it alongside a taster of the perseverance needed to get there.
Set against these fundamentals, the detritus of scientific knowledge is mere trivia. Equipped with these qualities an individual will as a matter of course acquire whatever knowledge they need for the task at hand, be that the most obscure scientific arcania or the most basic of manual craft skills.
Without these qualities a person may possess all the knowledge of the ages and still fail to be a productive member of society.
Interpersonal communication and shared problem solving should be at the heart of our education system. In the system we have created, we do not discover the nuanced magic which inspired Galileo but learn by rote the reduced, dry, dead husk of what his investigations uncovered.
Our education system focuses on what is least useful to us and deliberately fails to equip us with the very qualities that would help. How we came to create this hopeless system and to spend so much time trying tweak it without addressing its most important aspects is a mystery worth solving in itself.
