Education according to educators
The purpose of education is preparation for life
EduThirdSpace began as a podcast. For various reason, one being that I prefer writing, the podcast is on hiatus. Although in this newsletter I endeavor to capture how non-educators (in the professional sense) view education, I revisited the episodes to catalog how my guests, which were primarily educators, view education and its purpose1. They represent a variety of roles as educators: from museums to schools to home education. The overarching theme among the guests was a view that the process of education is preparation for life and living in a broader community, society, and world.
Jennifer Karnopp was a museum educator then teacher and school leader of a charter school she founded. She is now an assistant professor in a school of education and has spent nearly all of her career advocating for an inquiry-based approach to education. Karnopp succinctly defines education as "the process of growing and developing skills and understandings that will make somebody successful in life."
Kristin Otto is a cultural anthropologists who grew up loving museums and worked in one as a graduate student. She values an independent approach to learning in which the student is the primary driver of their learning, and the role of the teacher is to respond to students’ interest and abilities when developing the learning environment. Otto's perspective stems from her own experiences being educated. She attended a Montessori school as a child, and she valued the discussion-based, interdisciplinary approach to learning at her small liberal arts college.Â
William Reusch is a social studies teacher at a private religious high school in Los Angeles, with prior experience teaching at traditional public and charter schools. He views the purpose of education as "learning about how to navigate through life and how to do that well." He doesn't think education necessarily has to take place in a classroom; rather, friends, co-workers, and mentors can be teachers, as they were to him. For Reusch, education is bigger than just school.
Amara Stuehling is the assistant director of a global exchange program for pre-service teachers—i.e., those working towards teacher licensure. She was homeschooled (specifically, unschooled) until middle-school age, which shapes how she views education and what skills teachers who work in schools need to provide their students with a well-rounded education. In her view, education is about "helping students have experiences that will give them skills for being successful and productive members of whatever society they are a part of." These skills include concrete skills like math, reading, and writing, but also abstract skills like learning to respect and communicate with different people and communities all over the world. According to Stuehling, education doesn't end when school ends, for traditional students or adults: education can be formal or informal with people who one might not think of as formal teachers, and "there are so many different ways to continue education with technology and books."Â
Bridget Busse is a homeschooling parent, and she views education simply as "preparation for life." According to her, whatever the setting, an education should include learning life skills, such as economics. For example, she found choosing a healthcare plan to be stressful and something she should have been prepared for before obtaining her first full-time job. Those sorts of practical skills are what Busse plans to teach her children.
Kimberly Shlaes is a developmental therapist who works with young children experiencing developmental delays and their families. For her, education is simply the process of learning. As she describes, education "doesn't necessarily need to be in the current structure of a classroom setting. When people think about education they immediately think of schools, and while that is a huge part of education, I'm a big believer that education can really occur anywhere with anyone—through communication and storytelling, through exploration and problem-solving, and things like that. But any sort of acquisition of new information I would consider education."
Dakota Pawlicki is a former music teacher who has worked in the central office of a large public school district and for a higher-education-focused foundation. He adopts Philip Jackson's view of education: "A socially facilitated process of cultural transmission whose explicit goal is to affect an enduring change for the better on the character and psychological well-being of its recipients, and by indirection, in their broader social environment, which ultimately extends to the world at-large." For Pawlicki, in the practical realm, that means "education at its root is the opportunities, the mechanism by which we transfer our values, our knowledge, our skills to other people, and in particular, often times to the next generation. It's the process of how we help the next generation do better than us. If you think back to education prior to there even being formal education, there was just the oral history of passing stories down, which was all in an effort to help the next generation do better than we did, and to learn from our successes and failures. Another way to look at it, education in its modern manifestation, in the sense that we have schools, institutions, and policy, is a moral enterprise that we pursue as a society that really protects and strengthens our communities. Education, in and of itself is a pursuit, but the practical application of an education is one that allows someone to participate in the society that they currently belong to. Sometimes that does mean soft-skill development and the liberal arts, as well as hard-skill development and trades. The phrase moral enterprise is really what sticks out most as we consider the application of education into our community environment."
Sarah Hatcher is a museum educator and scholar and advocate of project-based learning. She tends to "think of education as a process." Hatcher is an admirer of John Dewey and resonates with the "quote where he frames education as a process of living and not of preparation for future living." Her succinct definition of education is: "a process of facilitating or providing opportunities so that somebody can learn." Hatcher "views education as allowing people to learn so that they can hopefully make the world a better place." She "hopes that through a good education people acquire the skills and knowledge and understandings that they need to make their own lives better and hopefully to contribute to make the world a better place."
Colleen Pawlicki is a former high school English teacher and now runs an editing, research, and writing business. In her view, "the purpose of education is social mobility: the ability to move up in whatever way that looks." For her, "liberation in education is social mobility: being able to work up whatever kind of ladder it is you're looking for, whether that is socioeconomic, whether that is raising your family from where they currently are, but some way to raise up. A lot of that social mobility piece is getting a better job. We get education to get a better job, get better employment, make more money, elevate our family, elevate ourselves." Pawlicki understands that many view education as the "search for truth and liberation of your mind, and these greater ideals, and that it's a right." But she sees education as a lot more tactical than that: "it's for that social mobility piece of getting a better job and improving your life."
The quotes have been edited for clarity.