An age-old question that inevitably arises when Boards of Education and community stakeholders gather to craft a school’s mission statement is: What does it mean to be educated? Typically, what is on the minds of those sitting in conference rooms is the intrinsic value of education. Although it may be articulated in different ways, the intrinsic nature of being educated is usually associated with cultivating critical thinking, inspiring curiosity, and developing a well-cultured individual.
In that same room, others may lean towards a more instrumental view of the meaning of education. In their view, schools serve four “uses,” best articulated by Harry Broudy:
- Replicative use: to reproduce facts, methods, etc.
- Applicative use: to apply what has been learning in new contexts
- Associative use: to help students make connections across domains
- Interpretative use: to involve deeper understandings.
Still others in that same room frame the question in terms of the goals of schooling. For these participants, they will use different vocabularies to describe five goals of schooling:
- To educate: What is the meaning of life?
- To emancipate: Who am I?
- To join: How do I effectively participate in a democratic community?
- To prepare: What do I want to become?
- To socialize: How should I behave?
For the academics sitting in the room, the question is understood in disciplinary terms: learning the vocabularies and methods of various fields that enable students to solve particular problems and make informed predictions. These academics reduce the question to disciplinary goals:
- Historians: The transmission of the human heritage
- Anthropologists: The humanization of the young that occurs in the dialogue between generations.
- Sociologists: The socialization of the young into the societal roles and values
- Political Scientists: The preparation of the young for citizenship
- Economists: The acquisition of knowledge, skills, and values necessary for gainful employment
- Philosophers: The development of a morally and socially responsible person
There is nothing wrong with any of the answers to the question of what it means to be educated. The real problem for those sitting in that room—the people who manage and teach in our schools— is deciding which answer to pursue, since each one implies a different set of pedagogical methods. How schools solve this muddle of educational goals is to reduce the substance of schooling to subjects and the methods of schooling to their uses. In doing so, the question of what it means to be educated becomes a matter of institutional outcomes—standardization and documentation. What gets left out, however, is the original intent of the question: to cultivate critical thinking, inspire curiosity, and develop a well-cultured individual.
When the meaning of education is reduced to what can be standardized and documented, both teachers and students lose sight of schooling as a humanistic enterprise—one grounded in inquiry, imagination, and moral development. Personally, I adopted Richard Rorty’s purpose of education, which is to equip students with the vocabularies and intellectual tools to challenge and rethink the “final vocabularies” they inherit—that is, the set of words, beliefs, and moral assumptions through which their parents and communities make sense of the world. I did not reject my parent’s vocabularies outright but in my course work and readings I developed a self-awareness and intellectual autonomy—the ability, in Rorty’s words, to redescribe oneself and one’s world in new term terms.
So much of the goals and methods of schooling at the secondary and post-secondary level focus on the transmission of inherited knowledge—what Whitehead called, “inert ideas.” In college, however, I discovered venues—mostly outside the classroom—where fellow students and professors offered me the intellectual means, the new vocabularies, to question the “final vocabularies” of my parents and the communities in which I was raised.
Alan C. Jones 