Reflection on Education
I’ve been thinking about education over the last few days. Here in Carlisle, there is a pretty important school board election that will determine the direction of where the district goes going forward. Will we continue on the same path, which has produced a pretty good school district and school system (all you have to do is check the rankings – Here’s a resource that offers the rankings.)? Or will we decide to change paths where our main concern becomes whatever the current culture war issue happens to be? That’s not an exaggeration – that what the two opposing teams of candidates are offering. Each of these teams won a primary and will face each other in the fall where voters will decide which direction to go.
And so, I’ve been thinking about what education is all about. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
Some claim that education is about getting a job. Getting a job is part of education, but it is not the primary reason for education, nor should it ever be the primary reason. Even if a person doesn’t need to work, education will serve them well in life, because education is more than just getting a job.
If all education is about is checking off requirements and then getting a job, then we are looking at education as a transaction – I do this, and in return I get this. Frankly, that would be a waste, a missed opportunity for education to be more fully what it has always been about.
Education is about the betterment of a person. It’s about forming a person into a responsible citizen where they live their life. Education is about growth of a person. It’s about raising questions and doing critical thinking. It’s about becoming more fully who you were made to be and who you are called to be. Education is about bettering life.
Education is not about memorizing facts and figures – that’s just memorization. Education isn’t about being able to recite something word for word. Education isn’t about data, facts, figures, information. All of that doesn’t require education. Those can be tools to assist in the educational process of course. But really, education is about teaching people how to use all of that. In a sense, education is about growing wisdom and thinking and discernment. In sum, education is about being human.
When all we see education being about is getting a job, then students are likely to think that they can stop learning when they graduate. They’ve completed the task. The checkmarks are done. But learning never ends. We continue to learn even if we aren’t consciously aware of it. When we treat education as a transaction, students are less likely to pick up a book and read after they graduate. They are less likely to take a class to learn something to better themselves or just because they are curious about something. They are less likely to travel or talk with people who are not like themselves or the culture they are familiar with. They are less likely to be open to correction and grow from new information that is presented to them.
The second part of education is just as important – it is the communal aspect of education. I hear one group running for school board talk about parental rights. Yet I wonder what they mean by that. I’m a parent of four children – One of which graduated, one is about to, and two will continue in their formal education in the school district. By definition I have parental rights. But I don’t share the same idea of what parental rights is all about with the people running for school board who are using this line.
My parental rights are not about banning books and preventing my kids from learning about or hearing about things that I don’t agree with. And it certainly isn’t about imposing this on other families. My parental rights are not about building a wall around my children, so they don’t know how to deal with the world or interact with people who are different from them. That’s not rights. Rights come with responsibilities. And as a parent I have a responsibility to make sure my children can function in the world, can work with people who are different from themselves, can think critically, can see that their ways are not the only ways of doing things. Banning books and “protecting” children from other ideas I don’t like is really just saying that I don’t know how to defend my own ideas, I can’t think critically about opposing ideas, and that my own ideas can’t withstand any critique or opposing ways of things about things. This isn’t what freedom is about. Banning books and “protecting” children from different ideas and cultures and history is really just the “freedom” to impose a belief system on your own children and on the children of others. And in my case, I don’t appreciate this imposition and I will push back against it.
I want my children to learn history – there are good and bad things that have happened to people. It’s not all roses and unicorns and the myths of greatness. There’s oppression, violence, tyranny, and destruction too. I want my children to know about these things so they can recognize them, they can think critically about them, and they know how to oppose them and work for justice, freedom, and wholeness.
I want my children to learn that there are people who are unique and different in so many ways. I want them to see and know who these people are. I want them to learn to see the value and worth that exists in each person just because they are a person. I want them to know how to interact with people, to listen, and to learn from others.
I want my children to read conflicting ideas that are challenging. I want them to struggle with what authors are writing – to hear the arguments, to raise questions, to think about what is being argued, and to formulate their own ideas in response.
In short, I want my children to grow into adults. Parental rights don’t require school boards determining for me what my kids should not be allowed to learn about. Parental rights is about my role as my kids’ parent, how I stay involved in their lives and education, how I challenge them and push them to be who they are called to be, how I encourage them and let them know that they are not alone in this journey of life, and how I help them to grow in the capacity to think critically for themselves. It’s not about making a clone of me. It’s about helping them be themselves as much as possible knowing all along that I love them regardless of whether I agree with them or not, regardless of what they do or become. That’s parental rights.
Which leads to the other point about the communal aspect of education. Education isn’t just an individual endeavor. It benefits the community. Why else would states be so concerned with the “brain drain” that happens. An educated citizenry benefits the community and society. An educated citizenry improves the lives of all. An educated citizenry means a citizenry that has the capacity to think critically, is more empathetic, more inquisitive, more open to ideas. That sounds like a citizenry that is freer. Free to pursue a thriving life for oneself and for the community as a whole. Freedom isn’t about being free to impose one’s beliefs on others because you think you know what’s best for everyone. That’s the definition of tyranny and authoritarianism. And it is to be rejected whenever and wherever we encounter it. That’s what I learned in my education.
Education is more than a transaction and it’s more than being about controlling people – it is about life, living, and being fully human.
As I read today’s post, I am having two experiences at once.
On the one hand, I am thinking about education as an entity, a thing, a subject matter or topic. What is it? (Definition) How is it useful? Who does it serve? Why have education…. stuff like that, and I am having a lot of thoughts and reactions to your post at that level.
At another level, I sense there is a political tug-of-war going on in your community regarding education which is representative of many communities making headlines these days. And though you didn’t reference one party over another or blame anyone for this or that, I sense STRONGLY that you stand against one of these factions, and that you have myriad reasons for championing the status quo – or what has been working up until now.
This will be wide off the mark of YOUR point, but since this is MY comment AND since you and I are engaged in another discussion elsewhere presently, I am seeing a point of contact between discussions which seems curiously important suddenly.
I am preparing my thoughts for an upcoming post on Ron Highfield’s book Rethinking Church, and as part of his rethinking of church in chapter 6 near the end of the chapter, he writes of families in our modern society which are pulled in so many different directions what with parents each going to their jobs in industry, kids going to school all day, everyone coming home at night to homework, soccer practice, and what not, and how in our day and time, families are not working together but increasingly apart. We are entrusting our children to day care providers and teachers and peers as we take a back seat in their lives!
Then we expect church to fill in the gap for us with a couple hours a week.
Hmmmm….
This is not natural. And no society in all of history experienced this on a wide scale before us, and especially since WWII.
There’s a lot more to education than even the education. And while I am not up in arms about some lesbian teaching my kids that abortion is a great way to plan a family, I nonetheless see where that is a feature of BABEL and not of home. AND I see that such a tower gets struck with a confusion of languages, which I think we are experiencing politically if not linguistically.
Here’s the key question that no one is asking – is what we are experiencing not the natural consequence of where individualism, minus a communal or common good, leads to?
Even in what I write, I’m making individualistic argument (intentionally and knowing full well). I’m doing this to show that our abuse of individualism leads to an essential problem. Whose individual preferences and opinions carries more weight? Because in individualistic systems (an oxymoron of sorts), it is inevitable that there will be opposing preferences and views and opinions and you can’t possibly meet both of them. So what do you do? If you stick with individualism, it ends up being the strong survive, or might makes right, or the ends justify the means. If you see the flaw in this, then you have to look beyond the individuals who are in disagreement and their preferences. And you have to ask the question – what is the common good? That’s what education is supposed to be about – the common good. There is no other way to settle the differences of opinion. What does the community need in its education system? That should be the most important question that we should be asking. And we aren’t because we’re too busy looking at what we individually want and prefer.
Well, one way to settle the differences of opinion is with the vote. But that leaves some as winners and others as losers. Then later we can fight it out again in the next election cycle. It can get quite bitter.
AS I see it, GREED is playing a major role in this. Your post points out that many of us are getting educated FOR THE JOB – as an ideal (which is a truly flawed ideal). But whereas universal education, which I am guessing is mostly a product of Renaissance times or the great enlightenment, when it was about common good and/or about being a fully orbed human (individualism in that), it has become a means to money now.
And if money could just be openly shared without enticing us to greed, then more money would probably just be a good thing. But instead it has become the main thing.
But there is this OTHER thing too. And for some of us, and I have sensitivities with this myself, the stretching out of my family in ways that leaves my kids to be shaped by others whose values I don’t share, is also problematic at least, and for some it is the devil incarnate. (It’s a lot of overblown fear too, in some respects, but then I had people telling me COVID was that, and I kept looking at Americans dropping like flies while they said it to me!)
WHAT CAN THE CHURCH specifically say or do to address the issue? WWJD?
We got into this position as a systemic thingy, and we can’t throw the system in reverse. That’s not an option, but wow! I share some of those sensitivities too (THOUGH TO BE CLEAR, I am NOT thinking DeSantis speaks for me!)
I’ll let you in on a little irony that is tripping my trigger at the moment; I have all these adopted kids born out of wedlock, from drugged uteruses and all manner of moral filth and poverty, and they suffer lasting impact from that damage! But… BUT… but they live in a white, middle-class home now without benefit of daycare! Even the neighbor kids don’t get that deal!!!
Go figure…
Oh the love of mammon is the root of all evil. And it is so insidious in how it goes about it. Never telling the truth. Always a lie. Always. While we might want it to tell the truth, it won’t because that’s not its nature. Walter Wink wrote about systems. They were created good, have fallen into evil, and need to be redeemed. Sounds just like people, doesn’t it?