Purpose of Education

Kate S has been reading --- with great misery -- the “comments” and “letters to the editor” about the Wisconsin legislative/teaching fight. It is open season on teachers and teaching. And it’s not just crazed ignoramuses writing uninformed swill. (See yesteday’s Chicago Tribune editorial “Lost: the Common Good” here if you have the stomach for it.)

There’s a broader culture-shift (not just anti-teacher) that we need to be aware of and defend against: the narrowing of the national discussion about “what education is good for.” President Obama has a skewed sense of the purpose of education. His last State of the Union Address focused overwhelmingly on education’s function in making the U.S. (and her citizens) “economically competitive.” There’s no sense of education being a CIVIC good or a PUBLIC good. Arne Duncan continues advocating for the same etiolated vision of education’s purpose that he did while at CPS.

If you’re interested, here are a couple links to inspire you to remember that our mission is not primarily to prepare kids for the college-race-to-nowhere or to help fight off those pesky engineers from India and China. We’re here to help form young thoughtful, critical, lterate citizens who (because of that preparation) are well-prepared for college and the economic competitiveness.

Here’s an article that Dan O sent me recently which questions the national push for technical (STEM – science and engineering). Funny, too. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfie-kohn/the-stem-sell-are-math-an_b_823589.html?view=print

Teaser: To listen to those who shape our society's conversation about education -- not educators but public officials, corporate executives and journalists -- the answer is yes. At the top of the heap sits the compound discipline of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Thus, for example, President Obama announced an expensive new public-private initiative last November called "Educate to Innovate" that will focus on improving student performance exclusively in STEM subjects. Then, in early January, he was back with a new education project. Was its intent to spread the wealth to other kinds of learning that he had overlooked before? Nope. It was to commit another quarter-billion dollars to improve the teaching of STEM subjects. And a few weeks later, in his State of the Union address, the only academic disciplines he mentioned were, yet again, math and science.

Thought experiment: Try to imagine this, or any other, president giving a speech that calls for a major new commitment to the teaching of literature, backed by generous funding (even during a period of draconian budget cuts)…. Yeah, right.

Here’s Robin Lakoff’s response to the State of the Union Address (from a college linguist):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-lakoff/education-yes-but-why_b_816052.html

Teaser: Understanding how human beings work -- through literature, music, art and the social sciences such as psychology, anthropology and (dare I say) linguistics -- has no immediate practical value. Except for a few of us, it doesn't translate directly into jobs (though for many more, it certainly translates into getting a job done well). It doesn't make this country more "competitive": it does not, in any direct sense, enable us to "win the future" (though it might enable us to fully appreciate that complex metaphor).

It's the very "impracticality" of the humanities that makes them valuable to human beings and their societies. Education is invaluable not only in its ability to help people and societies get ahead, but equally in helping them develop the perspectives that make them fully human.

And here’s Martha Nussbaum from the book I just finished (“Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities”)

“Today we still maintain that we like democracy and self-governance, and we also think that we like freedom of speech, respect for difference, and understanding of others. We give these values lip service, but we think far too little about what we need to do in order to transmit them to the next generation and ensure their survival. Distracted by the pursuit of wealth, we increasingly ask our schools to turn out useful profit-makers rather than thoughtful citizens. Under the pressure to cut costs, we prune away just those parts of the educational endeavor that are crucial to preserving a healthy society….

Democracies have great rational and imaginative powers. They also are prone to some serious flaws in reasoning, to parochialism, haste, sloppiness, selfishness, narrowness of the spirit. Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies, producing a greedy obstuseness and a technically trained docility that threatens the very life of democracy itself, and that certainly impede the creation of a decent world culture.”