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What is the purpose of education?
We usually assume that education is something good -- but what is it good for? What we teach will depend on what we ultimately want to achieve by teaching.
Unlike the question of how to teach, this one cannot be answered by considering evidence and explanatory models. How we conceive of education and its purpose is a choice we need to make by working from first principles.
The following, then, is a list of assumptions and ideas that are very much open to criticism. Many of them we hold to be self-evident, but we concede that we might be misled both in our premises and the conclusions we draw from them, and are explicitly looking for direct challenges to our position.
Unlike the question of how to teach, this one cannot be answered by considering evidence and explanatory models. How we conceive of education and its purpose is a choice we need to make by working from first principles.
The following, then, is a list of assumptions and ideas that are very much open to criticism. Many of them we hold to be self-evident, but we concede that we might be misled both in our premises and the conclusions we draw from them, and are explicitly looking for direct challenges to our position.
1) Education should benefit humanity as a whole
What is good for humanity? While there is great potential for controversy here, there are a few things we should be able to agree on. It is hard to dispute that the progress of science, broadly speaking, has made life better for most people. More concretely, we can single out the natural sciences and their technological applications, including medicine, as engines of improvement; and the scientific method as the historical game-changer that allowed humanity to begin steering its own destiny. Education, then, should make it possible for the project of.science to continue improving itself and the lives of people (as well as other creatures, in case that doesn't follow as a direct consequence).
In addition to that, we would argue that the diversity of human endeavors is a valuable good in itself. Any educational system that focuses too narrowly on any type of activity or area of inquiry will not only diminish the richness of human life, but also risk stunting the growth of those students whose talents lie outside that field.
What does that mean for our school?
In addition to that, we would argue that the diversity of human endeavors is a valuable good in itself. Any educational system that focuses too narrowly on any type of activity or area of inquiry will not only diminish the richness of human life, but also risk stunting the growth of those students whose talents lie outside that field.
What does that mean for our school?
- A focus on the scientific method, with its unique ability to fix its own mistakes
- Within science, a focus on practical problems, technological applications, open questions (see point 3), and the most important immediate and long-term challenges we must face as a species
- An orientation phase serving to acquaint students with a maximally broad range of human activities and endeavors, "from beekeeping to decision theory".
2) Education should benefit every individual student
This seems obvious, and it is also a necessary qualification to the first point if we don't want to risk sacrificing individuals to some potentially misled long-term goals.
"Benefitting every individual student" can be interpreted in a number of different ways: Education could benefit students by teaching them marketable skills (thus potentially ensuring their material welfare); by helping them make optimal decisions to reach their own goals (thus potentially increasing their life satisfaction); and by helping students identify and develop their own interests and talents (which might arguably do both). We believe that both the individual and humanity are best served if more people do what they are talented for and/or passionately interested in, rather than pursuing a standard path that is supposed to be 'best for all' (i.e. the lowest common denominator).
What does that mean for our school?
"Benefitting every individual student" can be interpreted in a number of different ways: Education could benefit students by teaching them marketable skills (thus potentially ensuring their material welfare); by helping them make optimal decisions to reach their own goals (thus potentially increasing their life satisfaction); and by helping students identify and develop their own interests and talents (which might arguably do both). We believe that both the individual and humanity are best served if more people do what they are talented for and/or passionately interested in, rather than pursuing a standard path that is supposed to be 'best for all' (i.e. the lowest common denominator).
What does that mean for our school?
- Parallel to the orientation phase mentioned above, students need to acquire the necessary skills to find out what they are interested in, what their talents are, and what they want to do with their lives
- After the orientation phase, the main function of our school will be to support students' individual growth and to challenge them to further develop their own talents. This requires extremely competent administration and sets an upper bound for the maximum number of students at a given school, but we believe that it is worth the effort.
3) Education should enable the next generation to go further than the last one.
One popular definition of education is "the transmission of skills, knowledge and values from one generation to the next". While this is entirely legitimate, we believe that education can and should do much more than that. As educators, our challenge is not merely to bring students 'up to our own level', but to encourage them to surpass us as soon as possible.
With some pathos, we could say: If our students think only thoughts that we ourselves could have thought, we have failed as educators. Only when we do not understand our students anymore has any real progress taken place.
What does this mean for our school?
Instead of trying to transfer our own world-view to students, we need to inspire them to ask their own questions and equip them with the necessary skills to find their own answers. Concretely, this implies:
With some pathos, we could say: If our students think only thoughts that we ourselves could have thought, we have failed as educators. Only when we do not understand our students anymore has any real progress taken place.
What does this mean for our school?
Instead of trying to transfer our own world-view to students, we need to inspire them to ask their own questions and equip them with the necessary skills to find their own answers. Concretely, this implies:
- Teaching science as a way of asking the world questions in a structured way in order to test hypotheses
- Putting less emphasis on what we already know, and more on what we don't yet know -- i.e. kindling enthusiasm for seeking out the gaps in our knowledge and tackling the hard problems
External resources:
- Our concept of having an orientation phase followed by / interlaced with a practice phase seems to mirror the idea of the "T-shaped student" (i.e. breadth-and-depth education) propounded e.g. by California's AltSchool.
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