Schooling does not equal education
At least, not in the liberal arts sense
"Liberal democracies don’t try, as Soviet Marxism once did, to make everybody agree about everything, all the time. But to maintain that flexibility, a liberal-democratic society absolutely requires that its citizens experience a liberal education, one that teaches students, scholars, readers, and voters to keep looking at books, history, society, and politics from different points of view," wrote Ann Applebaum in an article for the Atlantic. What follows from her argument is that schools should provide a liberal arts education. And not just on college campuses, but in all levels of schooling. But in most K-12 schools (as well as universities), this is far from the approach that is being taken. And I wonder if it's even possible to make this sort of course correction.
A liberal arts education is for the pursuit of the beautiful, the good, and the true, and it requires us to ask the big questions: What is a good life? And what does it mean to be a good person? These questions prompt us to go on an individual pursuit and a collective pursuit. You can answer the questions for yourself, but the answers should also instruct us in how we should live together. Students of the liberal arts look to classic literature and history for answers, but there are no bounds to how they respond to the questions.
This poses a problem for public schools in particular. Public schools are an arm of the government. As such, politicians and bureaucrats make decision for them, and politicians desire for schools to respond to current societal needs. The pursuit of the beautiful, good, and true would need to be wrapped up in the larger purpose that schools serve to be included in curricula. But if politicians, district bureaucrats, and school administrators have a specific desired outcome of schools in mind, an unfettered pursuit of the higher goals of a liberal arts education are not possible.
Public schools have and continue to serve a variety of purposes, one of which is social efficiency. A current need in society is producers of goods and services—our modern economy requires people and companies to create things that citizens of the society need and want to consume. It follows that decision-makers would want public schools to prepare children to produce goods and services in adulthood. Contributing to society in this way can certainly be an element of living a good life and being a good person. Entrepreneurship seems like a natural outcome of a liberal arts education—an individual using her talents and skills to improve the life of another. But what schools actually do is prepare workers, not entrepreneurs, to compete for existing jobs in the workforce. Cultivating the habits of heart and mind for an entrepreneurial spirit to take root is not a core aspect of the curriculum or, perhaps, not even desired.
Certainly some schools may center their purpose around encouraging entrepreneurship, but that is not the norm. More often, schools focus on a set of skills that corporations desire. STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) schools, for example, teach the skills that schools anticipate their students will need to work in these fields. A computer programmer will need to know how to code and will need to understand how to utilize particular computer software, for instance.
If one who holds that social efficiency should be the primary purpose of schooling is asked the question “what is a good life?,” they would likely answer that a good life is one in which a person has a good-paying job—working for someone else. What might follow is that they also view a good life as one in which a person can obtain everything that they need and desire as a result of having that job. They might believe in the “American dream”—house in the suburbs, two vehicles, two kids, a dog, a manicured lawn, etc. Their idea of a good life is strictly material.
Because social efficiency (and social mobility) is the dominant purpose of modern-day schooling, if you were to ask a classroom of children "what is the purpose of education," they would say "to get a job." This mentality does not align with the purpose of a liberal arts education, and it strays so far from the pursuit of the good, true, and beautiful it’s hard to imagine how the purpose of schooling could steer in the direction of education. But, I’m always open to ideas.