To talk about curriculum (what to teach) or pedagogy (how to teach) is to bump up against the question of why to teach. What is the purpose of education? And why do so few people address this topic directly?

Something similar can be observed in the field of psychology. A therapist’s practice is shaped by his or her beliefs about the ultimate goal of therapy and, by extension, what mental health looks like. But that means offering value judgments, something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Thus, straightforward prescriptive statements by psychologists about ideal human functioning are rare. So what fills the vacuum? One of two implicit goals, I think: either facilitating adjustment to social norms and expectations, or minimizing unpleasant experiences.

The first of these is about fitting in; it assumes that healthy is the same thing as normal.  The second goal might be called the medical model: Much as you’re satisfied to have your body cured of a disease or healed from an injury, so the objective is to get your mind back to baseline functioning and eliminate (or at least moderate) depression, anxiety, or character disorders.

Neither objective holds up well under close inspection. Erich Fromm and R.D. Laing, psychological theorists who doubled as social critics, pointed out that there’s a hell of a lot wrong with our society, ergo fitting in is not necessarily desirable. Conversely, according to Abraham Maslow, really healthy people, whom he called self-actualized, tend to be “not well adjusted.”¹

There’s a similar problem with the medical model. To aim for an absence of illness is to set the bar for psychological health awfully low. It also ignores the fact that people who live fully engaged, admirable lives may suffer “symptoms” because you can’t be creative without experiencing some anxiety. You can’t love without sorrow. You can’t make moral commitments without inner conflict. Someone who’s completely untroubled probably doesn’t qualify as an exemplar of health.

A few mid-20th-century psychologists therefore saw the need for a positive definition of mental health.² They realized that just because their colleagues weren’t wrestling with the values that informed their practice didn’t mean psychology was, or could be, value-free. Avoiding reflection and discussion of this question just meant the values lived underground.

So, too, for education: If we don’t think about goals, then learning comes to be seen as nothing more than a prerequisite to securing a credential — and, as educational historian David Labaree noticed, it’s rational to do as little learning as one can get away with. (Also, if some credentials are worth more than others, schooling becomes not a collaborative process but an attempt to triumph over everyone else.)³

My intention here isn’t to make the case for one particular positive purpose but rather to argue for grappling with this topic and to lay out some of the choices we find ourselves confronting as we do so.

1. Should the purpose of education for one student be the same as for another? Many of us condemn one-size-fits-all teaching and insist on the importance of attending to the needs and interests of each student. But should the ultimate objective of education also vary depending on whom we’re teaching? If so, how?

2. Should schools focus primarily on practical and occupationally useful skills? A yes to this question would seem to entail a no to the preceding question. If all schools provide versions of vocational education, students will inevitably receive a different kind of instruction depending on the type of vocation toward which they’re being pointed, which means the type of instruction in one’s classroom might be determined by one’s class.⁴ (It’s interesting to speculate on why a near-exclusive emphasis on “practical” skills and knowledge, particularly at the college level, is typically associated with the political right.)⁵

3. If education ought to be about more than preparation for work, what sort of intellectual outcomes are we looking for? Traditionalists who think in terms of a body of information that students are required to learn, and who rely on a pedagogy of direct instruction, are tacitly endorsing certain educational purposes. Wanting students to know a bunch of stuff is very different from wanting them to think deeply and critically, to be able to play with ideas in interesting and sometimes novel ways.

You may protest that these sets of objectives aren’t mutually exclusive, but the fact is that students’ days will be spent quite differently depending on whether the primary objective is to make them memorize what someone decided children of their age should know, on the one hand, or to help them “make fuller, deeper, and more accurate sense of their experiences,”⁶ on the other. Much closer to the latter formulation is a comment by anthropologist Judith Shapiro: The main reason to get a good education, she said, is that it makes “the inside of your head an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.”⁷

4. Is the goal just to foster capabilities or is it also to enhance the disposition to use them? What you’ve learned how to do is not the same thing as what you’re inclined to do. The first, which is what occupies most educational theorists, concerns proficiencies; the second concerns dispositions. To provide students with the skills of critical thinking, for example, is very different from encouraging them to think critically.⁸

The same is true of learning more generally, which is why it’s notable when someone maintains, as John Dewey did, that the main goal of education is basically to acquire more education — to have both the means and the desire to make sure that learning never ends. Some years later, Seymour Sarason elaborated: “The overarching purpose of schooling is to stimulate, capitalize on, and sustain the kind of motivation, intellectual curiosity, awe, and wonder that a child possesses when he or she begins schooling.”⁹ Intrinsic motivation is a critical ingredient of excellence, to be sure, but the question here is whether we also see it as an end in itself.

5. Should schooling be chiefly concerned with the mind? When I catch myself just weighing one intellectual priority against another, I remember that the educational philosopher Nel Noddings urged us to reject “the deadly notion that the schools’ first priority should be intellectual development” because “the main aim of education should be to produce competent, caring, loving, and lovable people.”¹⁰

6. Are we concerned mostly with the advantages that each student derives from an education, or should we be thinking more about its impact on a whole society? To this point our attention has been on the former, but perhaps we should be thinking about collective benefits. And if that is our point of reference, another question appears: Should schooling aim primarily to conserve and reproduce the status quo, as the social scientist Emile Durkheim believed, or, on the other hand, in the words of Jean Piaget, should we be trying to create people “who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done….who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who have minds which can be critical, can verify [rather than] accept everything they are offered”?¹¹

Another contrast to be drawn in thinking of the societal impact of education is between values that could be described as economic as opposed to humanistic. Whenever politicians or business people hold forth on the vital contribution of schooling (and call for it to be improved), they invariably stress economic considerations: education as an “investment,” students as tomorrow’s workers who require training to assist their future employers and assure their competitiveness in a global economy.

One humanistic alternative is to think in terms of how education can create, or sustain, a democratic society. Certain capabilities — and, in keeping with question 4, dispositions — such as critical thinking have an important role to play for both the individual and the society. We might think of it this way:

Perhaps the best framework for achieving both the private and public goals described here as humanistic — and, in the process, for refining our thinking about the goals themselves — is what Deborah Meier proposed as Five Habits of Mind.¹² She maintained that the study of virtually any topic in any discipline by students of any age will benefit from raising questions about
* evidence (“How do we know what we know?”)
* point of view (“Whose perspective does this represent?”)
* connections (“How is this related to that?”)
* supposition (“How might things have been otherwise?”), and
* relevance (“Why is this important?”)
The last of these, nominated by Meier as the most critical, supplies the connective tissue between what we’re teaching and why we’re teaching it.

To end on a meta note: One overarching educational objective might be to support students in weighing in on educational objectives. As usual, Dewey figured this out first; he emphasized “the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process.”¹³

Even many thoughtful educators don’t go this far. They may talk about giving kids choices, which often just means allowing them to pick from a menu of options (for example, which book on a list to read or topic to write about). Perhaps they also allow students to weigh in on certain components of the curriculum. But Dewey is saying that’s not enough. Just as we need to address the why, not just the what and how, of education, so, too, should students.

NOTES

1. Abraham H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 2d ed. (Harper & Row, 1970), p. 171. Aside from being conceptually problematic, the conflation of health and normality is also deeply conservative in that it discourages us from questioning the norms we’re supposed to adopt and the institutions in which we’re supposed to function.

2. In addition to books by the better-known psychologists already mentioned, see Marie Jahoda, Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health (Basic Books, 1958) and the many writings of Rollo May. By analogy, some political philosophers saw the need for a positive understanding of freedom: an emphasis on freedom to, as opposed to just freedom from. The classic formulation of that distinction was offered by Isaiah Berlin in a lecture (“Two Concepts of Liberty“) delivered in the same year that Jahoda’s book was published.

3. “We have credentialism to thank for the aversion to learning that, to a great extent, lies at the heart of our educational system,” Labaree wrote. When you think about it, it’s a rational response to an irrational system to try to “gain the highest grade with the minimum amount of learning.” Our schools thereby become “a vast public subsidy for private ambition,…an arena for zero-sum competition filled with self-interested actors seeking opportunities for gaining educational distinctions at the expense of each other” (David F. Labaree, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education [Yale University Press, 1997], pp. 259, 258, 32). This desiccated view of education, as I’ve argued elsewhere, helps to explain the readiness with which so many have welcomed AI tools into schools. If the goal is to understand and communicate ideas, it would obviously be pointless to have a chatbot read or write for you, but if no one has presented you with a goal beyond turning out a product and snagging a credit, then using ChatGPT is considerably more efficient than doing it yourself.

4. For example, during his tenure as president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson stood before a roomful of high school teachers and announced, “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks” (quoted in Lewis H. Lapham, “Achievement Test,” Harper’s, July 1991, p. 10).

5. In 1967, while governor of California, Ronald Reagan delivered an influential speech in which he declared that education should be about job skills; our treasury shouldn’t be “subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” That has pretty much been the party line for Republicans ever since; they have shown a “disdain for the humanities” and “portrayed a liberal arts education as an expendable, sometimes frivolous luxury that taxpayers should not be expected to pay for.” This has long been a feature not only on the right but on the extreme right. Hitler, for example, had no patience for the humanities or for intellectual exploration for its own sake. In his view, “education was a matter of practical instruction.”

6. Lilian G. Katz and Sylvia C. Chard, Engaging Children’s Minds: The Project Approach, (Ablex, 1989), p. 21.

7. Shapiro is quoted in Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 33.

8. For an argument in favor of promoting the latter option, see my essay “Challenging Students….And How to Have More of Them,” Phi Delta Kappan, November 2004, pp. 184-94.

9. Seymour B. Sarason, “Some Reactions to What We Have Learned,” Phi Delta Kappan, September 1995, p. 85.

10. Nel Noddings, The Challenge to Care in Schools (Teachers College Press, 1992), pp. 12, 174.

11. Piaget is quoted in Paul H. Sherry, “Public Education Today and Tomorrow,” Journal of Current Social Issues, Summer 1976.

12. Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas (Beacon, 1995), pp. 41, 49-50.

13. John Dewey, Experience and Education (Collier, 1938/1963), p. 67. Theorists influenced by Dewey have expanded on this idea. From Elliot Eisner: “The major aim of schooling is to enable students to become the architects of their own education so that they can invent themselves during the course of their lives” (“Questionable Assumptions About Schooling,” Phi Delta Kappan, May 2003, p. 652). Similarly, educational psychologist John Nicholls insisted that even young children are potential “curriculum theorists” who can and should participate in thinking critically about the “purposes that govern their learning” (Education as Adventure [Teachers College Press, 1993], p. 103).