Some thoughts on education

     What is the purpose of education? The most obvious answer is the desire to pass on accumulated knowledge to successor generations. The second, and arguably more important, function of education is to prepare people to act as functional, productive members of the society into which they are born and of the world at large. These two purposes are the immutable reasons for all teaching, whether child or adult, general or technical, scientific or spiritual.     The debate over what constitutes a "good" or "appropriate" education has always been about the methods rather than the purpose. This is self-evident, as no one can claim a desire to teach someone to be stupider or more antisocial. This means an analysis is required of what types of education exist, how they meet the two goals of education, what is the necessary amount of education for each person, and who is responsible for providing it.
    I will begin with the first goal: we teach to pass on knowledge. There are two fundamental kinds of knowledge - concrete and abstract. Concrete knowledge involves discreet facts, demonstrable and indisputable. This includes everything from the established facts of hard sciences such as physics and chemistry to the recorded events of history, from the unearthed artifacts of archaeology and anthropology to the literature of the world. We can say about all these things that they exist and we can explain what they are. Abstract knowledge pertains to the more fuzzy world of scientific theories and social analyses, metaphysical and spiritual explorations, and non-linear creative thinking and reasoning. The content of abstract knowledge, while often grounded in concrete knowledge, is not so easily proven, and, in some cases, particularly in matters of spirituality, is utterly unprovable. The critical difference between the two kinds of knowledge is that while no rational person can deny or contest a piece of concrete knowledge (irrational reasons for doing so will be addressed later), all abstract knowledge is subject to evaluation and interpretation based on personal beliefs and value judgments.
     Historically, the two types of knowledge were taught simultaneously and in a mixture that, if anything, weighted the abstract more heavily. The reasons for this are twofold. First, much of the education was offered by religious institutions, where an obvious stress would be placed on religious studies, i.e., the abstract. More importantly, though, it was recognized by early educators that in a world where people could not be specialists, it was necessary to develop strong abstract reasoning and critical thinking skills in those who had been lucky enough to receive an education in the first place. Concrete facts by themselves are useless, merely data points. One needs the abstract skills to place the concrete information into a context and to discover the non-linear connections between concrete data points that allow for progress and invention. It is no accident that the great inventors and discoverers of the pre-industrial age dabbled in all the scientific disciplines, as well as commonly being involved in theological studies. It paid to be a generalist, and a generalist mentality is impossible without critical thinking.
     With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, people became increasingly specialized. Furthermore, with the rise of capitalist entrepreneurs who were capable of funding large-scale education projects, a sudden shift away from church-driven education drastically shifted the landscape of how people were taught.The various governments of the 19th and early 20th centuries increasingly implemented education reforms that created public schooling and required all children to attend the government-run schools unless their parents had the means to send them to private schools.
     Two transformations took place. First, education was made widely available to the vast majority of children in industrialized nations. However, this education was provided by a single centralized source, encouraging conformity and by and large weeding out innovations in teaching that did not suit the organizers of public schools. Second, the focus of schooling was shifted away from cultivating a generalist mentality towards producing specialists for the world of business and manufacturing. This is evidenced by the consistent trend of dividing subjects into discrete classes with no effort to demonstrate cross-connectedness, as well as emphasizing rote memorization of facts and figures without providing insight into their meaning. The perfect examples of these trends are math and history. Math is taught in succeeding layers (arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, etc.) using primarily formalistic definitions and formula memorization. No connection is formed between the layers, and no creative mathematical logic is instilled (e.g., word problems are designed to fit the formulas rather than providing real-world examples that provide complexity and subtlety). History, meanwhile, is taught as a succession of dates and names without any sort of context or greater understanding of the impact of events on each other. Every child knows the name of Christopher Columbus, but has no idea why or how he discovered the New World. The abstract understanding of global politics is missing.
     The reasons for this shift are manifest. Once governments in the Western world recognized the advantages of capitalism, under the financial and political influence of magnates they set up the school systems to crank out workers for the factories. A worker performing a discreet mechanized job does not need abstract thinking or reasoning to play his role. All he needs is the basic understanding of his job provided by concrete facts and an attitude of regimentation perfectly instilled by the regimentation of the school day. Going to class and taking breaks at the same time each day perfectly translates into working a 9 to 5 job. The removal of unscheduled free time from an early age results in anxiety about similar unscheduled free time in adulthood. How many people don't know what to do with themselves during a vacation? How many people are happy to go home and watch TV (also perfectly regimented) to consume the waking time they do not spend at work? How many people do not know what to do once they retire? Furthermore, the creation of competition in schools through grading and testing translates well into the competition for finding the best work and receiving promotions in the real world.
     As far as the second goal of education, creating individuals well-adjusted to society, such a school system
 works quite well. It sets children on the path to becoming productive workers in a capitalist environment. But as to the first goal, passing on knowledge, the failure to teach critical thinking leaves a gaping hole in the knowledge of the average individual. All a child remembers, if he remembers anything at all from his schooling, is a group of disjointed facts. No greater web of understanding and connection exists for him. No creative ability has been developed in him. This leads to the greatest criticism against capitalism, that it dehumanizes people by turning them into automatons. This, sadly, is more or less true
     The failure of our current system of education, then, is not in the education itself but in its inability to match our idealistic vision of what education ought to be. The lofty ideals of education are to liberate the mind of each individual and to provide him the opportunity to become or do anything he wishes to be. The ideal quickly clashes with the pragmatism of providing education to every child and furthermore to everyone who wants it beyond childhood. It thus becomes important to consider what we believe a necessary amount of education is for each person. How much is enough to liberate the mind, and how much is just enough to make a person socially viable?
     I hope that everyone can agree that the very minimum every child needs to learn are what we colloquially refer to as the "basics." These include reading and writing, arithmetic and the basic functions of math, and a general set of information regarding the world we live in biologically, geographically, and politically. All of this data falls in the concrete set of knowledge, and anyone who professes a genuine desire to propagate the sum of human knowledge must agree that these things must be taught as early in life as possible. The only notable exception to this, briefly mentioned as the irrational objection earlier, is in an educational system that is created for specific extremist indoctrinational purposes and explicitly disregards or obfuscates the basic to suit their own ends. Notable examples include fundamentalist Muslim madrassas that teach children that the Earth is flat, or the schools of Nazi Germany which taught that Jews and other "undesirables" are biologically and therefore morally inferior to a specific ethnicity or race. Such schools seek not to truly educate their young, but to create unquestioning zealots for their extreme doctrines. They do not seek to liberate the mind, but to enslave it. As such, they should not be treated as broken educational systems but as pernicious propaganda engines.
     Getting back to the point, what is necessary for a child to learn beyond the basics? In past times, a common form of education past the elementary was an apprenticeship or trade school, where one learned precisely the necessary skills for a particular vocation with the assumption that he would continue in that job for the duration of his working life. Colleges and universities were reserved for the tiny minority who would become scholars in the true sense of that word, those dedicated to study and the abstract expansion of human knowledge. The idea of getting a college degree to work in manufacturing was beyond laughable.
     While this may have been more or less effective in the ancient world and the Middle Ages where economies did not dramatically change over short time spans either through a lack of diversity or institutional regimentation, in the 21st century this is no longer sufficient on its own. There are many modern jobs that do indeed require advanced education. But that does not mean that the old system is entirely useless. The Western world has abandoned the general practice of apprenticeships, I would claim to its own detriment. In the US, a college degree has become essentially a requirement to perform any job more complicated than punching buttons on a machine, more often than not without any justification for this being so. The common argument is that in the fast-changing modern economy, a worker will work several different jobs in his life, and needs the skills to cope with such rapid adaptation. I concur with the sentiment, but we have largely abandoned a system that has merit for precisely the kind of economy we live in today. How much healthier would the economy be if instead of going to college and racking up tremendous debt only to walk away with a degree and an education that they will likely never use again, the majority of college students went into apprenticeships and trade schools? They would begin earning money sooner rather than accruing debt, learn the skills they would actually use, and arguably, would be able to repeat this process easier and quicker if they needed to change careers in the future. I believe that the purpose of college should be exactly what it had been centuries ago, to provide an in-depth education in a specific field for the purpose of continued study and exploration within that field in an academic setting. It should not be a vehicle for parties every weekend and four years of idleness for a piece of paper, as it seems to have become for so many people.
     The counterargument is that college is where people gain a better understanding of the world around them and expand their horizons. This is where they liberate their minds. This is certainly true, at least in part, but why does someone have to wait until college to gain this understanding? Why can we not teach worldviews in our elementary, middle, and high schools? We can still produce the workers we want through trade schooling, but we can foster creative thinking so much earlier. Of course, diehard capitalists might say that you don't want a button-pusher in a factory to exercise creative thinking. I say that a vast increase in creative thinking in those who desire it transforms the capitalist economy in unpredictable and, historically, positive ways that benefit everyone. A bright child should not be doomed to button-pushing simply because our current systems wants him to. We need to restore the emphasis on abstract knowledge and the teaching of the interconnectedness of knowledge that we have been steadily losing for the last century.
     Finally, I want to touch on where the responsibility for education lies. This is the most subjective part of the discussion, and so I can do nothing more than state my opinions. I think the greatest harmful trend in world history is the reluctance of every individual to accept personal responsibility for his or her actions. The easiest thing in the world is to blame someone else for your mistakes or your circumstances. Unfortunately, the education of younger generations is no different. We have increasingly shifted the burden of teaching first out of the home into private institutions, and then onto the government and a government-operated school system. We then failed to provide this system with both the necessary resources and the clear guidelines required to succeed at reaching the ideal of education that we proclaim to want for our children. But at the end of the day, as a parent, it is your responsibility to yourself and to your child to teach him as best as you can. Parents have to be more involved in their children's upbringing instead of dumping them off on the state and then blaming it for their shortcomings. Education cannot be all about fact memorization and standardized testing to sort children for future employment. It must be a living, growing process to help the child see the world in all its complexity and strive to gain as much understanding of it as he wishes. Only when the perspectives and aid of parents, teachers, and peers are combined in the raising of our children will we see an education reform that will have any hope of reaching the ideals we profess. As the proverb says, it takes a village to raise a child, and right now most of the village is not helping.