Social capital is the purpose of school
More so, it's a (the?) purpose of learning alongside others
The four purposes of public schools have been described as: social mobility, social efficiency, civic instruction, and social justice. I have argued that civic instruction is the highest purpose of public education—the telos—and I’d go further to argue that it is the purpose of education, whether that education occurs within the walls of a school or not. But, when it comes to schooling, if we set aside the educational aspect of the equation, the book learning, schools serve another important function, a social function: they help students amass social capital, granting them opportunities to interact with individuals who have knowledge about, or access to, economic opportunities they may not otherwise encounter or learn about.
Schools introduce students to other students who are not like them in any number of ways and give them the space to interact with such students. Children and teenagers who attend school meet peers their same age who have acquired knowledge at home that is not introduced in schools, who grew up in households with varying levels of wealth (students from different economic classes, if you will), and who were raised within differing systems of belief. The third scenario presents challenges for acquiring knowledge within a school, which I have discussed elsewhere, but the first and second lend well to the school capital aspect of schooling and can satisfy the social efficiency, social mobility, and social justice purposes of school.
In a world filled with economic opportunities, children mostly come to witness and understand what is possible in adulthood by observing the lives and choices of their parents, other family members, and adults who live in their neighborhood. By attending school, they meet other children or adolescents their same age, become friends with a few of them, and as the friendship blossoms, are invited into the friend’s home for birthday parties, dinners, or to play. While socializing with their friends in their home environment, they learn about what their parents do for a living. They learn that either their friend has a similar life as them—e.g., “my friend’s parents work as nurses, electricians, teachers, plumbers, … just like mine do”—or they learn about career paths they never knew existed. For instance, a child might not know that engineering or botany are jobs that adults can do and can get paid for.
Until they interact outside of school with a child whose parents are in such lines of work, students might have a very limited scope of what’s possible. They may not know about entrepreneurship or that working for one’s self is in the realm of possibility until they hang out with a classmate whose family has a business operating from her house or walk home from school with a child who goes directly to his family’s business after school.
Of course, not all schools help students amass social capital. I taught at schools in neighborhoods with high rates of poverty at the start of my education career. My students were hard-pressed to find adults in the community who were doing well economically or who were successful at climbing the social ladder. Such individuals did exist, they did live in the neighborhood, but they were few and far between. Most economically successful adults left the neighborhood to achieve that status and never returned. Thus, seeing what was possible for them based on their interests and aptitude was difficult. The school’s teachers and administrators could help students envision the opportunities that may be accessible to them, but experience is better than being told. Adults who work in schools can direct students but they cannot show them, because teachers and administrators work in schools, they don’t work in the fields that interest students, unless the student’s interest is becoming a teacher or school administrator.
What’s more advantageous to students than learning second-hand what is possible is direct access to adults who are the masters of their craft, the crafts that students are drawn to.