Purpose of Education – Part II

 

In my introductory blog, I suggested that four questions need asking about contemporary education and schooling . In an abridged form they are as follows:

 

• What is the purpose of education?
• How best can educational leaders support teachers in being genuine educators?
• How do structural features (e.g. school size and teacher load, etc.) either enhance or undermine the educative project?
• How do we best use the potential of Schools 2.0 in the service of education?

 

You will find that this blog is structured—by way of its categories—to pursue each of these different paths, although I hope you will also see that they are intimately inter-related.

 

This particular blog is installment #3 in the “purpose of education” thread. In installment #2, I recommended the following as a good candidate for the purpose of education:  “to equip and inspire students to cultivate their humanity”.  I then proposed that “cultivating humanity” amounts to exercising our moral, intellectual, aesthetic and physical capacities, and perhaps our spiritual capacity as well.  In this installation, I would like to offer some introductory comments on what it might look like to “equip and inspire” students in relation to the project of cultivating our humanity.

 

Equipping Students to Cultivate Their Humanity

 

How does one “equip” students to cultivate their humanity?  We might first begin by celebrating the fact that this is both a beautiful and worthy question to ask of educators.  Think of the re-imagining we might do if we had this question foremost in our minds when we confront issues of curriculum and methodology.

 

But to return to the question proper, it seems to me that, once again, a look at the ideal of a liberal education might yield some initial sense of the potential landscape. In my research, I have found that there are usually four central themes or characteristics of a liberal education that emerge.

 

First, a liberal education is meant to offer its adherents certain emancipatory competencies, the possession of which are meant to open the way to further learning and eventual “freedom”. The most obvious contemporary examples are reading and basic reasoning, and then writing and speaking in relation to reasoning. The ancient Greek enkuklios paideia (verbal & quantitative literacy) and then the middle ages trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) seem to have been offered in this spirit. Insofar as computer and library research skills provide broader access to that which might be read, it may be possible to argue that these two also belong in the realm of emancipatory competencies. It is important to note, in any case, that to understand these “skills” as emancipatory competencies is to invest them with a much greater purpose than simply learning to read, write, think, or do math. One reads, writes, thinks, and does math, on this view, as an essential part of a larger project to gain an understanding of the world, and one’s place within it. It is also clear, however, that these competencies are necessary but not sufficient possessions for complete understanding. They form part of a liberal education, but not all of it.

 

Second, within most candidates for a liberal education there is typically some attempt to offer a broad familiarization – a broad acquaintance – with the major artistic and intellectual projects of humanity. This is sometimes expressed as the desire to have students acquire a “general education”[1]; sometimes it manifests itself in a call for “cultural literacy” on the part of students [2]; and sometimes it gets expressed as an attempt to initiate students into the “great conversations” of human inquiry[3]. To have an “educational acquaintance” with a broad range of knowledge is, in Aristotle’s terms, to have a universal (as opposed to a specialist) education:

 

Every systematic science, the humblest and the noblest alike, seems to admit of two distinct kinds of proficiency; one of which may be properly called scientific knowledge of the subject, while the other is a kind of educational acquaintance with it. For an educated man should be able to form a fair off-hand judgment as to the goodness or badness of the method used by a professor in his exposition. To be educated is in fact to be able to do this; and even the man of universal education we deem to be such in virtue of his having this ability. It will however, of course, be understood that we only ascribe universal education to one who in his own individual person is thus critical in all or nearly all branches of knowledge, and not one who has a like ability merely in some special subject. For it is possible for a man to have this competence in some one branch of knowledge without having it all.[4] .

 

With reference to a liberal education, the basic idea here is that in order to achieve some  understanding of oneself and the world, one must have a reasonably good sense of the history and achievements of humanity.

 

Third, there is typically embedded within the idea of a liberal education the idea that the knowledge examined should somehow be essential or fundamental knowledge, as opposed to the transitory and superficial. This sentiment is expressed in the title to Charles Bailey’s book which reads Beyond the Present and the Particular: A Theory of Liberal Education.[5] It’s also expressed in the yearning of E.F. Schumacher in his chapter on education within Small is Beautiful:

 

We also may be more fortunate … and find a teacher who will “clear our minds”, clarify the ideas – the ‘large’ and universal ideas already existent in our minds – and thus make the world intelligible for us. Such a process would indeed deserve to be called ‘education’.[6]

 

These essences might be described thematically, as for example, in Michael Oakeshott’s and Robert Maynard Hutchins admonition to have us initiate students into the “great conversations” of human inquiry. Alternatively, these essences might be understood epistemologically. In 1965, Paul Hirst published a landmark paper entitled Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge in which he suggested that there are seven distinct “forms of knowledge” , (each having their own central concepts, distinctive logical structure, unique truth tests, and “particular techniques and skills for exploring experience and testing their distinctive expressions”[7] ) which of logical necessity must form the basis of any true education. The key idea here, throughout all these different expressions, is that a liberal education must somehow concern itself with that which is central and essential to knowledge or to humanity.

 

Finally, there is within almost all versions of liberal education, an explicit attempt to cultivate rationality and the life of reason. The source for this is probably Aristotle with his assumption that what makes human beings, human beings is their capacity to think. The thread that seems to wind through most versions of a liberal education is the idea that it is important, indeed crucial, to exercise and express that which makes us truly distinctive as a species, i.e. our capacity to be rational.

 

In the context of a liberal education, therefore, the project of “equipping” students to cultivate their humanity requires and involves the acquisition of emancipatory competencies, a broad acquaintance with the story of humanity, exposure to essential as opposed to superficial knowledge, and an appreciation and understanding of the life of reason.

 

What follows from this in terms of actual teaching?

 

• That we have an obligation, as educators, to ensure that our students achieve a kind of baseline competency and literacy, i.e. that they can read, write, and do math to be sure, but also that they know their way around the world geographically and historically, that they have some sense of the rudiments of art and music, and that they know their bodies. We need to make sure our students have this competency and basic literacy because they are the tools of freedom; they provide the foundation upon which to build a life.
• That we need to arrange our curriculum in a way to enable students to acquire a broad familiarity with the “great conversations of human inquiry”. We need, in other words, to give students some sense of what it is like to think and act like a scientist, a poet, a mathematician, an historian, an ethicist, an artist, an athlete, and a musician. The goal, in this instance, is not professional competence; it is instead a nascent understanding and appreciation of the scope and diversity of human achievement.
• That we need to teach subject matter in a way that reveals the core, or fundamental principles, of the study undertaken. This requires that we as teachers understand what is essential about a field of inquiry and what is merely illustration. In almost every class or presentation we need to bring students back to these fundamentals so they can see how lines of inquiry or exploration are like languages, each with their own vocabulary, syntax and grammatical structure.
• That we need to teach our students, in a direct and deliberate way, to reason.

 

 

Inspiring Students to Cultivate Their Humanity

 

Here we are, admittedly, on more difficult terrain.  How to “inspire” students toward the cultivation of their humanity is, again, a beautiful question, but in this case infinitely more subtle and complex. 

 

And yet it remains, nonetheless, the second half of the education we need to give students if our aim truly is to have them cultivate their humanity.  It is that half, in which we as educators, attempt to rouse within our students sometimes the passion and sometimes the horror of what it is to be a human being. It shows itself when we expose our students to stories or exemplars of great works or actions; when as a coach or homeroom teacher we offer advice about how to deal responsibly with a difficult problem; and when we admonish our students for moral transgressions.  It can be detected in the challenges we engineer for our students and in the way we deal with them when things go wrong. Mostly it is manifested in the hopes and aspirations we project that go beyond our classroom instruction.

 

What “inspiring students” requires, first and foremost, is a conversation amongst teachers within schools (and indeed within society at large) about what attributes we are going to hold up for students as worthy of pursuit and emulation.  While there are some, perhaps many, who might claim that there are no single set of attributes we might—as teachers—universally embrace and promote, I am less pessimistic about this.  I think the range of things we already do as teachers, coaches, and principals offers good evidence of our wanting to cultivate worthwhile attributes in students.  What I think is missing, however,  is a clear framework within which teachers—as educators—might understand, defend and more intentionally promote  this crucial dimension of the educative project.   The construct of “cultivating our humanity” is meant to provide such a framework.  I will have to leave it to another blog—and perhaps to those in the blogosphere—to offer more concrete examples of what this might look like.

 

Some Questions

 

If we think of education as a project of, in part, equipping students to cultivate their humanity, what pieces have I missed here?

 

I sometimes get worried that this construct of “cultivating our humanity”  might easily morph into the kind of self-indulgent pursuit of self-actualization that might only resonate within the context of an affluent North American society. I wonder, therefore, if a more simple and pragmatic picture of education—e.g. one that concentrated on basic literacy and, perhaps, a very direct education on environmental dangers—might be more defensible. Thoughts?  Help?

 

What sorts of attributes—virtues, if you will—do you as a teacher attempt to promote or cultivate within your students? Do you think these attributes are universally worthwhile, or do you think they are relevant and applicable to only some students?

 

Next Blog

 

Not sure. Will likely be something on “excellence” in education, as this is a word that many schools, and many educators, invoke to explain and defend what they are doing.

 

References

 

 

[1] Ernest L. Boyer & Authur Levine, A Quest for Common Learning, Washington: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1981.

[2] E.D. Hirsch , Jr. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.

[3] Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation, Vol 1. Great Books of the Western World, Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952.

[4] Aristotle in Charles Van Doren, A History of Knowledge, New York: Ballantine Books, 1991. p. 135

[5] Charles Bailey, Beyond the Present & the Particular: A Theory of Liberal Education. London: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1984.

[6] E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. London: Sphere Books (Abacus Edition), 1974, p. 74.

[7] Paul Hirst, “Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge” in Paul Hirst, Knowledge & the Curriculum. London: Routlege & Kegan Paul,  1974. p. 44.

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