In my previous blog I proposed that in contemporary education there is very little attention paid to the purpose of the undertaking, i.e. that such considerations are replaced instead with an immediate preoccupation with curriculum and implementation. I then implied that without a robust sense of purpose we lose our capacity to make coherent decisions about curriculum and implementation and at the same time deny ourselves a lodestone that would give meaning to our work. I further suggested that without a substantive examination of essential goals, we deprive ourselves of the capacity to re-imagine our practices.
In this installation I would like to offer a candidate description of one substantive and robust articulation of educational purpose. However, a couple of preliminary notes are in order. First, while I take it that there are a variety of reasonably good candidates as to the purpose of education, I am nonetheless recommending this articulation as one that is particularly good at capturing and representing a number of key essences and in so doing is thereby particularly capable of bearing the weight of much that can be said or implied with regard to curriculum and methodology.
Second, the value of this kind of rendering lies in the details or the explication of the surface-level words. You will see soon enough that the opening proposition amounts—on the face of it—to little more than a slogan, not dissimilar to most “mission statements” in schools. Unlike the case of most mission statements, however, it is in the careful explication of such a slogan that the substance of a full-bodied educational philosophy is meant to emerge.
Third, I need to briefly recognize the distinction between “education” and “schooling”—by pointing out that the former is a larger concept than the latter—and explain that I am speaking about something in between these two, i.e. about a society’s interest in preparing and supporting citizens to live what used to be called the “good life”, and in so doing to make a positive contribution to the polis. My domain of inquiry, therefore, is not so large as to encompass the “education” someone might acquire from life in general, but neither is it so narrow as to concern itself exclusively with what happens in schools as presently constituted. My focus, instead, is on “education” understood as an intentional undertaking that is carried out under the implicit or explicit endorsement of society as whole, i.e. through the vehicle of schools, or indeed through mechanisms we cannot yet imagine.
To begin then, I will propose that the essential purpose of education is “to equip and inspire students to cultivate their humanity”.
As suggested, the substance of this simple slogan cannot be revealed without considerable explication. There are, in fact, at least three code words (or code ideas) within this phrase that need further articulation: “cultivating humanity”, “equip” and “inspire”. I will attempt the first of these in this blog and save the other two for the next installment.
Cultivating Humanity
The idea of “cultivating one’s humanity” has its roots in the classical idea of a liberal education, which itself will need some explanation. The basic elements of a liberal education first found concrete expression in the “quadrivium” and “trivium” of the Roman curriculum, but has important antecedents in the teachings of the ancient Greeks. The central idea is that it is the kind of education that enables a person to be “free”. The key to understanding a liberal education is to understand the very precise manner in which this “freedom” is intended.
Commentators on liberal education speak about gaining freedom from certain constraints and acquiring freedom for the exercise of certain capacities. (Charles Bailey, Beyond the Present and the Particular, )
Those who speak about gaining freedom from constraints usually have in mind the ignorance, superstitions, and indefensible habits and conventions of our times. The basic idea here is relatively straightforward. A liberal education is meant to give students the knowledge they need (combined with a capacity to reason) to break free of these sorts of obstacles. The emphasis here, from Aristotle, is usually on the capacity to reason.
The idea of acquiring freedom for the exercise of certain capacities is a bit more difficult to grasp, although it is by far the richest of the two formulations. In this version, a liberal education is understood as the kind of education that enables or equips a person to express the very best of what it is to be a human being.
The idea of being able to identify “the very best of what it is to be a human being” is very much a classical ideal. It presupposes that there are qualities and actions that we can point to which represent humanity at its best and at its worst. It assumes that we can make important and intelligible distinctions between instances of courage, humility and beauty as against examples of cowardice, arrogance, and evil. And it assumes, further, that the point of education (and of life) is to cultivate the best of which human beings are capable.
This last proposition is perhaps the most important because it makes explicit the teleological nature of a classical approach to education. The word “telos” means ultimate purpose or end. It comes from the Greek word for the bullseye of an archery target. To take a “teleological” approach to education, then, is simply to understand the enterprise and arrange one’s instructional strategies in the context of some ultimate purpose or end. In classical parlance, this ultimate purpose or end is usually expressed as some shared (or potentially shareable) conception of the good, or conception of the good life. A liberal education understood in a classical sense, therefore, is one that is explicitly designed to support an ultimate end, where “ultimate end” is understood as some conception of the good life.
The question that immediately arises, of course, is what constitutes a “good life”? The classical answer is that the good life consists in the fullest cultivation of human excellences. For Aristotle this meant, for certain, the cultivation of one’s capacity to reason. But the Greeks, Roman and indeed the modern world favours other excellences as well. The conception of the “good life” that underpins the view of liberal education presented here can best be captured by saying that to express the very best of what it is to be a human being is to continually cultivate our moral, intellectual, aesthetic and physical capacities, and perhaps our spiritual capacity as well. The “good life”, in other words, consists in cultivating these capacities within ourselves to the best of our ability.
In addition, therefore, to being the kind of education that frees students from the ignorance and superstitions of their times (through exposure to knowledge and to the ability to reason), a liberal education is simultaneously the kind of education that frees a person for the cultivation of certain human qualities. It proposes that there are certain things students need to know, certain skills that they need to acquire and certain dispositions, or virtues, they need to have in order to be both capable and inclined to break free of habit and convention and to cultivate human excellences. The freedom that graduates of such an education attain, therefore, is the freedom that comes with cultivating one’s humanity to the fullest.
Some Questions
Do you find it peculiar and ill-advised or necessary and worthwhile to attempt to formulate a substantive account of the purpose of education in this way? If the former, why?
Do you think the construct of “cultivating humanity” is either too broad or too narrow a target to which the efforts of education—i.e. the equipping and the inspiring—might be aimed? Can you suggest some other destination that might be more fitting?
Do you think it is true to claim that part of what would count as full expression of what it is to be a human being is to cultivate one’s “spiritual” capacity? Are we somehow less human if we do not cultivate a spiritual capacity? Are we somehow less human if we do not cultivate our moral, aesthetic, intellectual, and physical capacities? Or at least, attempt to cultivate these to the best of our abilities?
Some References
Charles Bailey. Beyond the Present and the Particular: A Theory of Liberal Education. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
Timothy Fuller, Ed. The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
Martha Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1997
Next Blog
A Candidate for the Purpose of Education – Part II
The particulars of “equipping and inspiring” students
