In my last blog, I surveyed the different approaches to the question: “What does it mean to be educated?” When asked that question in strategic planning sessions, the responses below involve the cultivation of judgment, imagination, and moral awareness:
- Critical thinking
- Being stretched beyond the limits of backgrounds, prejudices, and opinions
- Cultivating humanity
- The art of reason
- Analysis, argument, and interpretation
- Current fashions and practices in the academic disciplines
Although school administrators at these meetings will nod their heads in agreement with these responses, upon returning to their offices, they think and act upon the goals of schooling. Administrators distinguish between the two competing goals of schooling: being educated and being schooled. Being schooled refers to the formal structures through which their communities transmit knowledge, skills, and norms, aiming to produce measurable outcomes such as literacy, competency, and social conformity. The schools they lead are organized around standards, assessments, and credentials that document the progress of an institution.
While schooling prepares individuals to participate in society—the socialization goal—education equips them to understand and, when necessary, to challenge it—the individuation function. Dewey ascribed the goals of schooling to primary and secondary schooling as formalizing the young with what their elders take to be true, whether it is true or not. College and universities, on the other hand, should be about helping students realize they can reshape themselves—the educational function of schooling. Higher education is not a matter of inculcating the truth. It is a matter of inciting doubt and stimulating imagination.
The distinction between the goals of schooling and what it means to be educated was played out every time I returned home from college. My parents expected that college was augmenting the goals of schooling—transmitting knowledge, occupational skills, and societal norms. In the college classrooms I was sitting, however, they were inculcating in me the intellectual tools to question, in the words of Richard Rorty, my parents’ final vocabularies. Becoming educated in my college classrooms was a continual process of questioning conventional wisdom.
Unfortunately, in today’s educational environment, the goals of schooling have all but erased the goal of becoming educated—courses devoted to the development of judgment, curiosity, and the capacity to think critically and independently. Instead, higher education is increasingly organized around occupational goals that prize credentialing and the monetization of degrees.
Alan C. Jones 