What Is Education?

What the real purpose of education is?

• Read the article and what is the real purpose of education. An interesting spat unfolded in the pages of the Free Press last week over the purpose and value of education. It began with an article by University of Illinois professor, G.V. Ramanathan, declaring that we do not need the "elite" math that schools teach. It continued with Winnipeg math educator, Neil Dempsey, countering that a working knowledge of math is crucial to everyday life in today's world. Neil Dempsey is right to say that we need basic math skills in our daily lives, if only to ensure that our calculators are giving us reasonable answers. Every time we check our change, calculate a tip, figure out whether or not we can afford something we think we need, we use math. At the same time, Ramanathan has a point. Few of us ever draw on what he calls "elite" math. I graduated from high school over 50 years ago, and never once have I used the trigonometry, calculus, or even basic algebra, which I dutifully studied. Where both writers go wrong is to assume that what students are taught in school must in some way be of practical use in daily life after they graduate. By this token, most of what schools teach is either frivolous indulgence or a stupendous waste of time. In my own case, for example, I spent seven years in my teens studying Latin but since leaving school I have never read a Latin text or even conjugated a Latin verb. In English, I learned to distinguish a dactyl from a spondee, a Petrarchan from a Spenserian sonnet, and to master a range of recondite literary skills. In history I could recite the terms of a variety of peace treaties from Utrecht to Unkiar Skelessi and beyond. None of it has been of practical use in life after school. But this does not mean that my schooling was a waste of time. It taught me that there was a wide and interesting world out there that I knew next to nothing about and that there were many ways of approaching it, whether through the arts, the sciences, the humanities, or some other form of intellectual and creative endeavour. What schools at their best give students is an introduction to the accumulated record of human achievement. We teach math, not because it might be useful in adult life, but because mathematics is an important part of what it means to be human. We teach science and literature and history because they introduce students, in however introductory a fashion, to a world of thought and imagination that would otherwise remain closed to them. Today everything has to have a price tag. Every subject in the curriculum has to have some so-called practical objective. It is no coincidence that one of the commonest questions students ask their teachers is "Will this be on the test?" Years ago I asked a class of Grade 10s what they hoped to get out of Grade 10. They told me I had answered my own question: they wanted to get out of Grade 10. Why? So they could get through Grade 11 and then Grade 12 and then a job or college or university. For them schooling was series of meaningless hurdles that adults had created for them to jump over on their way to success in the wider world. Lost in all this, as in Ramanathan's dismissal of elite math, and other critics' dismissal of such allegedly unnecessary subjects as history, literature, music, and the arts is any notion that education is, or should be, a means of introducing the young to a much wider world than they might otherwise encounter. More than a century ago the British poet and critic (and school inspector), Mathew Arnold, insisted that education was all about becoming acquainted with what he called the best that has been thought and written. We can argue about what we mean by the best, but one of the key functions of schooling is to prepare us to listen to and better yet take part in that continuing debate. Otherwise we reduce education to job training, or career preparation as it is called these days. This is certainly one function of schooling, but education should be so much more. That is why, looking back, I don't regret having had to study the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi and conjugate my Latin verbs, or even dabble in elite math, all those years ago. Ken Osborne taught history at Daniel McIntyre Collegiate in the 1960s and is now a professor emeritus of education.

• Answer:

  What and what? If it o0pens us kids to a much wider world then we know it, why don't they inform us? Why are their hundred of millions of factory workers who got these education or what ever.