What is the purpose of education?
Like it or not, we are moving towards online education. Are they the same? What are we really looking for in an education?
In recent years, education has been undergoing an interesting shift. Education was initially resistant to technological change where the school was delivered offline and we couldn’t imagine a fully online schooling system. And then suddenly, covid strikes. Schools around the world have no choice but to adapt to online delivery. This goes for all levels, from pre-school all the way to university.
I was part of the change.
Last year, while pursuing my postgraduate, I was forced to shift from the daily route to class into the daily log in to my zoom account. Suddenly, I was facing an online examination with no graduation parties to look forward to. No one was ready but no one has other options. We were forced to change and we were forced to innovate.
It was not an educational experience I expected before. But then looking back, it begs a question. What was the educational experience I was looking for? What was the purpose of education? Am I missing something because of the transition to online delivery? What is education for anyway?
Note: As a good alumna :), I’m using the Cambridge Dictionary definition of education; ‘it’s the process of teaching or learning, especially in a school or college’. So when you see the word ‘education’, I’m mostly referring to formal education — primary to university education.
In the pursuit of acquisition
We want to obtain something. We look to own something new out of the education experience. We want to get from 0 to 1.
A brief from the Center of Global Development says:
“ The goal of basic education is to equip children with the foundational skills, abilities, knowledge, cultural understandings, and values they will need to successfully participate in their family, society, polity, and economy.”
Here we see that education is equipping people for their integration process to society, from someone who doesn’t know anything to someone who knows something. But, at the moment, these are limited to what society wants us to know. What society thinks is normal to know. It is not about exploration, but it is about acquiring available knowledge.
Hard skills are about productivity.
When we think about hard skills, it is probably occupying more than 80% of the current content in our formal education. We are taught to learn about math, engineering, economy and finance, to digital marketing. The aim is to equip us enough so we can productively contribute to the economy. All of the knowledge we gain, from the basic math in primary schools to the financial modelling in the university, is aimed at increasing our productivity in the labour market.
There is nothing wrong with it. Just that when the education system over-emphasises the value of hard skills, that becomes a concern. Everything needs a balance in this world, isn’t it? If we only know about the theory of financial modelling but have zero skills in presenting the data — it is really hard to go far in our career. We may know all about how to answer math exam questions, but without understanding the basics of how to learn and expand one’s independent thinking, we might face difficulties in real life. Exam questions are framed in such a small variation of problems in the world, but life’s problems are of thousands of variations. This brings us to the second type of skill, soft skills.
The need for soft skills is ever more important now.
With the advancement of technology, we see that computer algorithm starting to take over the mundane tasks of humans. Soon enough, I don’t see why any students need to memorise the year of World War II when we can easily google for it. It has now become more important to learn how to socialise, how to continually be curious and creative, and how to empathise and tolerate differences. In essence, I think it is important for schools to emphasise more on teaching how to think, and not what to memorise. Students should learn how to learn and education should be teaching the way to live.
Soft skills are more tricky to get right. Maybe because there are no one right answers, unlike hard skills. Soft skills are about the personalised approach. Skills such as networking or leadership for instance, easily have hundreds of adaptations. The way we lead and the way we network will depend on different personalities and situations that one faced. There are no one right solutions to teach. It needs time and a personalised curriculum while being not that straightforward to teach. The current standardised education curriculum doesn’t work well with soft skills. Which is also why we don’t see soft skills being tested in exam but developed through activities outside schooling.
And then we also have an issue with the hidden curriculum. Alsubaie (2015) mentioned that a hidden curriculum refers to the unspoken values, behaviours, and social norms that exist in the educational setting. Though it is not written, a hidden curriculum implicitly enforces certain social beliefs and behavioural patterns in students. And exactly because it is “hidden”, the hidden curriculum has been blamed as one that has reproduced social inequality. Imagine a girl who studies in a school where her teacher always gives more chances to boys and discourage girls from presenting in the class. She will over time learn and normalise the culture that boys are better than girls. Just one example out of many.
Here, education is a tool to obtain something. We hope to acquire and we hope to own something — knowledge and skills.
In the pursuit of hope
Education is the pass to change our life. We want to move up the social ladder in the community we are in. We want to be educated because that’s how we will earn more money and respect from society. How did this happen? I think two aspects, productivity and signals.
Productivity
I briefly mentioned this above and it is so apparent in our educational system. Education is aimed to improve our productivity. There is a clear input and output relationship.
We study to get by. We go to school with the hope of finding a job and competing in the labour market. In Human Capital theory, education is a way to enhance the productivity of human beings so they can contribute more effectively in markets (and hence contributing to economic growth). Here, education is a one-way transfer of knowledge. It concurs with a teacher-centred or behaviourist pedagogical approach, where the teacher delivers content to students and students are expected to follow the instruction. Skinner and Watson, two proponents of behaviourism theory believe in operant conditioning; where certain stimuli will result in a certain predicted action. Similarly in education, this kind of relates to rote learning; with the same input, all learners will acquire identical understanding. Give them books, and you get exam scores in return. I see this most often in the online education that we have now. Where educational contents are broken down into a bite-size curriculum where students are expected to acquire a similar understanding at every step. It is scalable, but is this the education we are looking for?
This means schooling has a fixed technical relationship between inputs and outputs. We can also think of education as similar to that of the neoclassical theory of production, students as inputs and work-ready graduates as outputs.
Signals
In economic theory, there is what we called information asymmetry. Employers find it hard to differentiate between a good graduate versus a not-so-good graduate. Education is seen here as a signal. When we are comparing high school versus university graduates, we will most likely choose the latter one. Similarly, going to a reputable university is sometimes (okay well, most of the time) not about the secret knowledge you can get out of it, but is the signalling effect you will get with the certificate. Prestigious universities unlock the door of opportunities because it acts as a good signal to the employers that you are at least a good graduate.
It doesn’t always convey the truth, of course. I know a high school graduate who is way more competent than university students. I know people who don’t go to reputable universities but add so much value at work — vice versa. Nonetheless, this is just how society currently works. No systems are ever perfect, and the signalling system through educational certificates are what we have for now.
It expands freedom, capacity and opportunity
When I said in the pursuit of hope, what I am trying to convey is that eventually, education is expanding one’s freedom, capacity and opportunity in life. Of course, I’m referring to Sen’s capability approach(*wink*). Through education, we want to expand one’s substantive freedom, increasing someone capacity to flourish in life. It just happens that we live in a capitalist society that value productivity over everything else, hence the over-emphasise of increasing one’s productivity in the labour market. In the end, what we hope to achieve through education is to allow anyone to do whatever they want, whatever things that they value in life.
In the pursuit of truth
We learn for the love of learning. We learn for the discovery of truth. And we learn for self-actualisation. Education is an expression of oneself, no acquisition, no hoping for a better life — simply just learning. Peter (1966) argues that the purpose of education is a transformation of a person where it is personal and intrinsic to each individual. Education cannot be reduced to a set of activities because it is valuable in and of itself.
Constructivism
Opposing behaviourism, the team who support constructivism sees learning as a social process. Draper (2002) mentioned that constructivism “is the philosophy, or belief, that learners create their own knowledge based on interactions with their environment including their interactions with other people”. Here, they argue that the teacher’s primary role is as a facilitator and they should encourage students to create their own knowledge through their personal experience. Education, therefore, is a process, not the end result. Education aims to increase one’s capacity for growth in order to find meaning on their own. Anyone can interpret the educational content however they want because there are no right answers.
As John Dewey (1916) put it,
“Education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.”
Power et al. (1989) proposed a concept they called the “just community”, where the emphasis of the academic community shall not be the acquisition of knowledge, but the sharing of people’s lives. An approach that is somehow in line with making hidden curriculum no longer hidden. The educational curriculum should not be limited to the transfer of knowledge and competence, but should explicitly include other ethical and personal values, allowing students to explore themselves, instead of moulding one into industrial cogs.
One great idea in transforming our educational system that I found really interesting is to have early education focusing on teaching students to be a “person”, and later education can focus on transferring technical skills.
Having vs Being
While reading Erich Fromm’s book ‘To have to to be?’, I came across the education meaning through his definition of having versus being. Fromm argues that our society has deviated so much from being, and has focused a lot on having; piling up more possession than ever before. Similarly, in education, a student in the having mode have laser focus to hold onto what they ‘learned’, and less focus on producing or creating something new. Having mode sees knowledge as a possession. The more you have, the more social prestige you are likely to have in later life.
The process of learning will look entirely different to the students in the being mode. They listen and actively stimulating new ideas and perspectives in their mind. The purpose of education is not to acquire more knowledge to take home and memorise, but to actively and creatively engage with the materials productively. Education is a transformation, not an acquisition.
These are not mutually exclusive
I am still struggling to define the relationship between the three pursuits, but I came to a conclusion that they are not mutually exclusive. They can happen concurrently but they can also be opposite of each other. I also don’t see them as though a stair. It is not that we need to think of education as acquisition first before moving up the ladder into the pursuance of truth. Of course, sometimes we do. There are times we need to ensure hard skills and productivity before the pursuance of abstract truth. If day by day we are struggling with necessities, what use of truth?
Nonetheless, I don’t think it’s about who comes first. I see them more like an equilateral triangle. No matter which way you see it, they are of equal size and yet, each side supports the other.
Once again, this writing is never meant to define what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — but rather, what is appropriate for a given situation that people faced. My goal is to systematically categorise the various purposes of education. Who knows it could come in handy in the future?
