What is education for?

This is an article that pushes back against the idea that schooling is (or ought to be) primarily preparation for a future job. I enjoyed it because it seems that the Overton window in the US has shifted lately to the point where both the Republicans and Democrats are arguing that education needs to be more practical and focus on employable skills, and that colleges should stop offering "useless" majors. This idea horrifies me, it's an incredibly bleak view of the future and moreover a resignation to it.

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Education has no clear purpose. That’s not a criticism, it’s just an observation that there are numerous conflicting visions of what education is “for.” What are we actually trying to do for kids by making them go to school, and why are we trying to do it? If it’s an attempt to help kids understand things they’ll need to know in their daily lives, much of contemporary education makes little sense: very few of us will use chemistry or algebra or French. But it would be very helpful to know how to cook a good breakfast, negotiate a pay raise, or defuse an argument. If education is about making “model citizens,” well, we would probably expect civics to be treated in a little less cursory a fashion. Maybe education is about teaching job skills, providing abilities that will prove useful in making a living. Maybe it nourishes souls and expands horizons. Maybe it’s just a way to keep as many kids as possible in a room together and therefore out of trouble. Or maybe it doesn’t do much of anything at all.

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A deeper problem here, as anyone who isn’t a libertarian economist will have noticed, is Caplan’s narrow definition of the “usefulness” of education. He treats “value in the job market” as education’s main measure of worth. The debate over whether education teaches job skills or just offers signals is an interesting one, but it contains a hidden premise: that what we’re supposed to be doing is preparing kids to be good employees. Of course, if that’s how you measure the worth of teaching, then the arts aren’t worth a damn, because, as Caplan points out, artists starve. (Unless they go to work for advertising firms.) But while liberals and conservatives alike often speak of education as if it’s mostly supposed to be a pipeline to a skilled job, there are humanistic approaches (i.e. the ones that see people as more than productivity machines) with somewhat different views of what education ought to be doing.

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Caplan, however, simply gives up. Even if kids do like the “useless” stuff, he says, what good is it? They will only grow up to be disappointed when they find out what the economy actually rewards:

. . . Teachers expose students to an ossified list of subjects: music, art, poetry, drama, foreign language, history, government, dance, sports. Some kids respond eagerly, especially to music and sports. Yet the greater their excitement, the greater their ultimate disappointment: almost no one grows up to be a violinist, painter, poet, actor, historian, politician, ballet dancer, or professional athlete.

To which we say: exactly. The problem isn’t the kids, but that we live in a world in which history and ballet are valued so little compared with, say, devising new credit default swaps or more new ways to target advertising directly at people’s hopes, fears, and insecurities. Sure, if you can make money by issuing payday loans but not by writing plays, it makes a certain amount of “sense” to give kids usury lessons and cut the drama department. But this isn’t the only alternative, and it puts culture into a death spiral: the less anybody ever hears about beautiful, diverse, and varied things in school, the fewer people will develop any interest in them, which means fewer people will value them. If you think playwrights are poorly-compensated now, wait until the libertarian future in which nobody even knows what a play is. (Also: how many adults are disappointed that their middle school focused too much on music and not enough on job training? How many of them wish they had been child laborers instead of doing fingerpainting? Come on.)

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There are many possible visions for what education could and should be. But the one thing it shouldn’t be is preparation for wage work. Attempts to destroy education in the name of efficiency are going in exactly the wrong direction. Instead of more efficiency, we need less of it. Students should be finding out about all of the fascinating things in our big, wonderful world, not being fitted and measured for future drudgery. What is education for? It’s for becoming a person, not a worker. [Emphasis mine]