Thoughts on the meaning and purpose of education in today’s world in Daydreaming on the Porch

The cost of college is a cruel joke these days, and has been for some time. It makes indentured servants of students beholden to the usury of lenders, and thus graduates are permanently in debt paying off these loans, and they have ever-diminishing job and salary returns.

I have reluctantly concluded that it’s a total waste for the majority of young people to get more than a minimal foundation in the liberal arts, and even more, to get any type of traditional four-year college education. Unfortunately, however, the bachelor’s degree, however irrelevant educationally it may be to the recipient, continues to be, against all logic and reason, an entry code, a passkey, a ticket, or something similar, to jobs and higher earnings over a lifetime. Hence, society sees it as necessary for entry into the conventional middle class or higher levels of socioeconomic status. This is simply because, logically, prospective employers would rather take a chance on someone who has labored through four grueling years of courses and lectures which, mean nothing to them, but which indicate some level of determination and endurance, as opposed to a non-college graduate who didn’t have to suffer the ordeal of boring classes and final exams, nor did he or she even want anything to do with that excruciatingly long, class-conscious ritual of life in America. Who can blame them?

This is not to say that many students work very hard and take college seriously, if their attention span hasn’t been fried by all the time they spend on their phones. But a huge part of the college experience is socialization, maturation, partying, and transitioning to adulthood. Except for the overconsumption of alcohol and binge drinking, these social aspects of the experience can be very useful and helpful, and often the only way many young people grow up.

About 25 percent of college students reported having academic consequences due to drinking, according to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. And college is also a huge source of stress. According to one study, these are the five top stressors: 1) adjustment to living with roommates; 2) taking care of daily personal needs without parental support; 3) the challenges of managing freedom; 4) learning time management; and 5) dealing with the college work load.

All of this comes at a huge cost. The average 2021-2022 annual tuition for public, four-year colleges was $10,740 for state residents, and $27,560 for out-of-state residents, according to CollegeBoard data. Is it worth it, emotionally and financially?

Colleges should focus on the hard sciences, social sciences, and humanities and liberal arts and let tech and community colleges prepare everyone else for the 21st century workplace, which they are already doing at present. This should be greatly expanded. Professional grad school programs can prepare teachers, social workers and psychologists. There are law and medical schools for those professions.

Yes, but one could argue that requiring some exposure to English literature, composition and the humanities for all students seeking a bachelor’s degree, will perhaps spur a tiny few to expand their horizons into the worlds of fine arts, literature, history, philosophy, all this through the interplay of creative and fertile minds with the study and appreciation of their work and writings. But in the average in high school, is this worth the agony and expense of trying to reach, much less teach, classrooms filled with video-enabled and TikToc and Instagram-hypnotized youth who could care less about reading, history, and literature, including creative non-fiction and journalistic writing, memoirs, short stories, novels and poetry?

Those with eyes that open to what is before them through the windows of intellectual opportunity, will have had those eye-opening proclivities from an early age, enabled by their surroundings, level of inherited intelligence, and from peers, parents and elders who have influenced them positively so that they are serious about learning, which is a far cry from the average student who is merely passing through grades to graduate because without a high school diploma, he and his parents realize, there’s not even the pretense of getting higher paying jobs. Unless you with a 9th grade education, suddenly become famous and wealthy on YouTube as an “influencer” with a million subscribers.

Reaching, or going minimally beyond, the skill levels students are able to attain in the basic academic subjects, including reading, writing and math, let them thenceforth journey on the educational and vocational paths that are suited to their goals, prospects and interests, not educational futures forced on them through parental expectations, societal prerequisites, or sheer lockstep conformity to the beat of only one drummer.

There will always be seekers of knowledge and wisdom, regardless of the damage later grade school education does in its attempts educate the mass of students equally, which is an impossible task.

I think we must admit that public education, and private as well, is primarily a pretext to instill normative rules, beliefs and behaviors in young people. At least that’s what public education has always aimed for, particularly since the Industrial Revolution in the mid to late 19th century set in motion the need for reliable workers meeting minimal standards of literacy, citizenship and self-discipline. Education was going to do this on a large scale and become a means of mass production of worker citizens, just as in the actual world of industry.

My junior high school, newly constructed and opened in 1964, was a long shiny, cheerless rectangular tube of two stories, packed to overflowing with 900 students who swarmed in the hallways like disturbed hornets each time the bell rang to change classes. I detested the place.

What a fine mess we’ve ended up with, building impressive multi-million dollar, more architecturally advanced hives to produce the same and worse educational outcomes as in past decades. This rather well illustrates the points I am making.

Do we want to continue with the industrial model of education that creates boredom, disciplinary problems, mayhem and disaffected future adults? I think not.

What do I base much of these reflections on? Many years ago, I taught in public and private schools, and at the college level. I’ve seen and taught all the various types of students, and from diverse backgrounds. In the right situations and environments, it was the most soul-satisfying “job” I’ve ever had. In the fatefully wrong teaching jobs, it was terrifying, like a terrible nightmare, and soul-deadening.

I learned long ago, that teaching was never going to be a lifelong career for me, although I considered myself a good teacher, and parents of my grade school students, and the administrators I taught under, as well as college student evaluations, provided me with the evidence and encouragement I needed. I was making progress in the art and science of teaching because I have always been a person who is highly inquisitive and eager to learn. In my youth I took education very seriously. As a teacher in my 30s, I was motivated and idealistic, until that became impossible.

I had put a lot of work into becoming a teacher, and took all the education methods courses to get my masters in education, and then my state certification, I even began to think of the profession as my calling, as I had previously considered journalism, but a phalanx of adverse circumstances and situations, including my own over-reaching and, most significantly, poor choices, derailed that vocation. It was truly a case of living and learning. The three years I spent teaching in one private grade school were probably the most satisfying of my life.

I now have what I consider a broad perspective on education in the 21st century, four decades after I was last in front of a classroom. I’m pessimistic, but also hopeful. I think we are finally beginning to tap into and utilize the vast and unlimited educational potential of the Internet. We are realizing, as never before, that highly educated citizens are better equipped to rationally and competently evaluate and utilize the information that bombards them every day. They have been taught, and know how to effectively use, higher-order learning skills, among them critical thinking, metacognition, evaluation, synthesis of ideas and information, inference and application of what they learn. Critical thinking is the real goal of education, beyond the basic learning skills, and, in my view, the humanities offer the best grounding in the skills and source material needed for that. But today there are many fewer history and English majors. Why is that? Students and their parents perceive erroneously that there are poor job prospects for liberal arts graduates. But as savvy employers know, and have known for ages, those graduates make some of the best and most capable employees. But as always, we find ourselves doing cost-benefit analyses. Who makes more money? Engineering graduates or English majors. Might we instead ask, “What is most important in life? Money and material success, or a mind trained to pursue knowledge and wisdom?

Back to the question of what, more broadly speaking, are the most effective educational methods, goals and settings? I’ll mention but a few of the key ones that have come to mind in the course of writing this essay: small classrooms; competence in computer technology and skills; self-learning and self-study skills, and practical application of these; hands-on and experiential educational coursework; motivated, idealistic, but realistic and highly inquisitive grade school teachers and college instructor/teachers who are not imprisoned by endless paperwork and bureaucracy, or trapped in the publish or perish syndrome at the university level; and lastly, vastly increased reliance on, and utilization of less expensive and more heavily job-and-career focused technical, vocational and community colleges that can provide meaningful and relevant educational opportunities for all learners and students, regardless of class, race or financial status.

Finally, I believe that lifelong learning is crucial to a good life. There’s so much to learn, so many mysteries of the universe to delve into, so much ancient wisdom to discover. It’s painfully sad when people have no interest in this type of learning. This could include listening to college lectures online; watching educational YouTube videos; taking classes at a nearby college, or online, or simply reading voraciously all your life because you are a critical thinker who loves to engage with other minds in the essential human enterprise of learning and discovery. What a gift and privilege to use our minds productively. And today with the Internet, it’s infinitely easier to learn about anything and everything that you find interesting and worth knowing.

Last updated January 08, 2023