Throughout this semester’s Civic Issues blog, I have explored how many different aspects of our culture and society affect how we provide and receive education in the United States. It is complex, flawed, while also great and innovative. We have come so far in history so that America’s education caters – albeit sometimes at different levels of effectiveness – to both genders and a variety races and nationalities. But for we college students who have successfully made it to the other side in mandatory public education, I feel inclined to present a question for your mulling over: What really is the purpose of it all?
Is the goal of public education to prepare citizens for a “required” higher education necessary to get a job? Think about it. More people go to college than ever before, but are we necessarily a smarter population? Degree inflation runs rampant. Couple tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars later, and some college grads are back for round two with the parents while waiting tables at the local restaurant. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with waiting tables ( do it – it’s super fun), but what was the point of going to school? Societal pressure? No, this isn’t an answer.
In contrast, according to Spring’s The Goal of Public Schooling, the opening statement of the U.S. Department of Education’s A Guide to Education and No Child Left Behind, the goal is not for you own good, but the good of the country. “Satisfying the demand for highly skilled workers is the key to maintaining competitiveness and prosperity in the global economy”. Not that there’s anything inherently bad about this – but this is for America, people. In fact, the book also blatantly reads, “Parents are not asked at the schoolhouse door what they want their children to learn and how they want their children to be taught; these decisions are made by a complex political process”. Rather, public schooling operates on the public interest. But here I ask you, is this dangerous? Because primary and most secondary schooling is required, one could infer that educational institutions can serve as driving forces in indoctrinating a young population with specific political and economic ideologies. After all, Nazism was enforced outside and within the classroom walls, as fascism, German superiority, and undying devotion to the Führer was instilled into minds that had no other choice. Oh, you say, but that’s Nazi Germany. And yet, have you ever wondered how an American high school history class in America differs from an American history class taught in Germany – in any other country for that matter? Where does utilizing history to learn critical thinking skills and gain insight into the human condition cross over into territory of indoctrination? No, using students as political chess players and economic weapon-wielders should not be the primary goal of education either.
However, some do argue that the purpose of public schooling is in order to instill good values in accordance to good citizenship, all this being required to maintain a functioning republican government. According to Gastil, deliberation as a means of a successful government can only successfully occur with proper education of citizens. Is that not the point of this Rhetoric and Civic Life? Which, in a way, we have to take?
And yet many students, including many voices within this very class, instead advocate for a different education; an education for the purpose of our own personal intellectual stimulation. After all, we’re the ones making the investment; is it so selfish to elevate personal benefit above all else? I challenge you to think about why you’re here in college, and also how you benefitted from the past twelve years of public education.
And also,
what would you change?
