The best education does not necessarily come from the best teachers or the best schools. Behind those happy elements lies an important factor not often addressed in discussions of the problems of public schools: a desire for self-cultivation, the self-discipline that insists on learning whatever the learning environment might be. Discipline is a constant in our conversations about schools. Self-discipline doesn’t often register on the radar in such discussions. In my experience, teachers most often talk to students about obedience to them and to the rules. I don’t ever remember a teacher talking to us about the importance of disciplining ourselves. How do we develop in our children a desire to take their own discipline in hand? I don’t have an easy answer for this. My own self-discipline waxes and wanes. The trouble with self-discipline, at least mine, is that it has no memory. That I had enough discipline to pull off one major, demanding task is no sign that I will marshal the discipline for the next. But a sustainable culture without self-discipline is an oxymoron. What is the role of education in creating a sustainable culture? What is the role of education in creating a self-cultivating, disciplined citizen who sees his or her role in the culture as serving family, community, nation, the great world of ten thousand things? How do we create citizens who are willing to place limitations on themselves, their power, and their acquisitions so that there might be enough for everyone and for those other creatures whose lives humans depend on though we may not recognize it? How does education fit in the issues we have been addressing here? There are other questions that swirl about education in our time that also affect our ability to create a sustainable culture. They have largely to do with the purpose for which we educate.
The purpose of education, according to some Native Americans, is to ensure the survival of the people. Koyukon Indians along the Koyukuk River in Alaska—and many other indigenous peoples around the globe—use traditional stories to teach their children those values that will maintain balance and harmony in the world. The Koyukon call these tales “true stories” and say, “They teach us how to be human.”1
In the Western tradition, Socrates wanted to educate systematically so that the republic would comprise citizens trained in virtue. He seemed to believe that the young already know all the knowledge the world has ever contained and that their education can be achieved by reminding them of what they have forgotten. Others see children as empty vessels into which adults must pour the information they have learned so they can lead satisfactory lives. Socrates requires us to choose one view or the other. Our purpose becomes either to draw out or to stufffull, a choice that requires us to adopt radically different teaching strategies, a fundamental choice now largely ignored in schools of education. Means and ends, as Socrates recognized, are clearly linked.2
In the Chinese tradition, Confucius believed that good government becomes possible only when men gain that clarity of thought that comes from the discipline of finding and using clear language. They clarified their thoughts by searching the limits of knowledge, educating themselves as widely and deeply as possible, and insisting on the accurate word. The first task of government, Confucius claims in his Analects, is to “rectify the names,” to call things by their right names. Self-cultivation, or self-discipline, was seen as a lifelong task and the key to achieving wisdom. Having disciplined themselves and brought order into their own lives by clarifying their thoughts and their language, men could bring order to their families. Having brought order at home, they could bring order to the society.3
In ancient Rome, Seneca, writing to his son, decries scholarship that strives to tell him exactly which rock Ulysses landed upon but cannot tell him how to quiet the wandering of his own heart, or the mathematicians who can measure exactly the extent of his landholdings but cannot tell him how much is enough. In essence Seneca asks us to think not only about the purpose for which we educate but about the relationship between scholarship and the humanities. Apparently, in Seneca’s view, they are not contiguous, and the amount of land one holds is not only a practical matter of survey mathematics, accounting, and the law, but a matter of philosophy and spiritual health.4
In our time and culture, the purpose of education is to get a job and make America the number one economy in the world. To assure this we create apparently never-ending sets of standards to measure our children’s achievement and then hand them standardized tests to make sure they are meeting our goals for them. Contemporary schools must graduate students who can accomplish what an older, purportedly better-educated generation could not.
Keeping my survey small, I asked my son Kevin, who works in an alternative middle school, what the purpose of education is. He stopped working out for a few minutes, thinking about the question, then said, “I think it is to create openness.” “Openness to what?” I asked. He thought again and said, “Balance and harmony,” smiling, because he must have known what my next questions would be. “What are you balancing?” I asked on cue. “Mind and heart, the rational and the emotional,” he returned. “And the harmony?” “I think it’s harmony within ourselves, and between ourselves and others, and between ourselves and the natural world.” He began working out again, but I couldn’t help interrupting to ask, “Openness to anything else?” He stopped awhile, staring off, then replied, “Openness to becoming natural in ourselves instead of contrived.” He meant, he explained later, that we have to cultivate ourselves in such a way that our selves grow naturally into lives that we do not have to edit or be embarrassed about or protective of, that do not require secrecy to maintain a facade of probity. Respect, caring, compassion, thoughtfulness, and openness would become our natural life.
Kevin is as eager as anyone I’ve ever known to learn things: how the world actually works, what ideas science and history and philosophy can give us to consider, what the world’s greatest thinkers have discovered through the ages. Yet for all the information he has acquired and the knowledge he loves to mull over, his learning seeks still larger aims.
John Goodlad, director of the Center for Educational Renewal at the University of Washington in Seattle, and his colleagues Roger Soder and Kenneth Sirotnik hold that education is moral in nature and that a moral life is therefore at least one essential purpose of education.5 In this they echo Socrates, who insists that we educate to instill virtue. Neither Goodlad and his colleagues nor Socrates has any interest in an education that is merely moralistic. Virtue and morality lie in citizenship exercised for the common good—not in a canon of laws that govern personal behavior but through participation in a community’s life that can grow only from persons whose purpose in life is to achieve wisdom. Acquiring wisdom is the ultimate purpose of education for Confucius, Socrates, Seneca, Goodlad, Soder, Sirotnik, and Kevin too.
Do we and our educators have the same purpose in mind for the education of American Indian, black, Hispanic, and Asian students as we do for white children of the upper and middle classes? Is our purpose in educating women the same in every respect as our purpose in educating men?
Despite the hue and cry about dead white males, Plato was the first great feminist we know of in the written tradition of the West. In The Republic he insists that “if we are going to use men and women for the same purpose, we must teach them the same things.” Plato also insists that women and men have exactly the same capacities, except, perhaps, physical strength. Even then, he points out, some women will be stronger than some men at even the heaviest physical tasks. Both the means and the ends of education ought therefore to be exactly the same for men and women, Plato thought, including training to become the philosopher king.6 Do we agree in our time? Is our purpose as coherent as his?
Can we educate to good purpose and quantify or objectify everything in the process? Why do we want our education to be so objective, so quantified? Life does not give us objective tests, so why do we spend so much effort teaching people to take them? Life is the least standardized, least objective, murkiest, and most muddled test we’ll ever take, with no clear answers to any of our most human dilemmas.
Is it appropriate to strip the teaching of values from our schools? Is that even possible? We have tried to prohibit discussion of values in our public schools for some sixty years. Why are we surprised, then, that our prominent citizens are going to jail and their children and grandchildren, who are now our students, appear to have no values beyond self-interest or are, fortunately, learning their values from sources other than their parents? We scorn the McGuffey readers for their obvious touting of values and prefer our own, more subtle and objective texts that we claim, deceiving ourselves, to be value free. Why do we think that prohibiting a discussion of values in schools is not in itself a profound declaration of value, questionable as it might be?
Do we educate for each person to develop a self to the greatest possible extent, educating toward maximum individual growth and self-expression? Or do we educate for participation in a community where self-restraint is a primary virtue and citizenship a cherished responsibility? Do we try to get both these results from a single system? Sam Keen holds that “education has two primary foci: it must initiate the young into the accumulated wisdom and techniques of culture, and it must prepare the young to create beyond the past, to introduce novelty, to utilize freedom.”7
What is the nature of the person? Is the self unique, private, to be developed alone? Tribal cultures that have already had longer lives than Western culture seem to be among those in which the sense of self is not primary. It may be that the stronger the tribe feeling is, the weaker or less important the individual self-image is. In Alaska many educators believed that native students suffered from a poor self-image. But if the sense of tribe comes first, and if it is strong enough to outweigh a sense of individual self, is there a self-image to damage? It may be that in tribal cultures the self-image is not suppressed, submerged, or damaged; it never existed in the first place. Is it possible that the image that has suffered is instead the Indian child’s tribal image, and it is that image that needs strengthening? That seems possible given the effort that our educational and political systems have invested in destroying the organizing principles of the tribe. The problem Anglo educators often ascribe to American Indian kids on reservations, then, may be a reading into their plight from our own perception of ourselves, and not their real condition at all. How can white schoolteachers, brought up in a culture that does not understand tribalism and generally has been hostile to it, possibly be competent to undertake restoring a tribal image?
Could such a circumstance also occur among the street gangs our urban citizens so greatly fear? If we insist that we need to improve their self-image, are we saying that we need to improve what does not exist for a gang member? If membership in a gang provides the primary identity, how can a single member have a poor individual self-image? Is the desire to be part of a gang a search for community, a desire for freedom from the exile, loneliness, and fear that grow out of America’s rampant individualism, its isolation of those who are different, poor, or otherwise marginal? Could it be that gang members are more civic minded and intelligent than the rest of us, unwilling to remain outside a community to which they can contribute and in which they can find support? And given the questionable state of middle-class, white, Western culture with so many problems growing out of its fixation on the value of the individual, how can anyone be sure that replacing a tribal or even a gang identity with an individual sense of self is such a good thing?
Both Westerners and the Chinese desire the development of the self, said Ron Scollon, a linguist who has lived and taught among the Chinese, “but in the Chinese view, the self can never be developed alone but only in conjunction with others.” In a telephone conversation, he pointed out that Westerners seem to believe that rationality, the ability to reason, is the shared common characteristic of humankind, the one capacity that sets people apart from other animals, and that sets one individual apart from another. “But the Chinese,” Ron declared, “would say that kinship is what we share.” Indeed, “Deliberate moral reasoning, in that view, is a sign of inadequate personal progress rather than a distinctive feature of humankind.”
When asked about our American culture’s apparently muddy notions of the purpose of education, one English professor recently said of higher education in California, “Every university or college president I know in this state is very clear about his purpose as an educator. . . . Each one sees his task as becoming number one in a competitive system, or at least among the top ten in the region. And they know how to achieve that too—by quantifying everything. The college with the most Nobel laureates on the faculty or the most Pulitzer Prize winners in the English department is clearly the top school.” Some public school administrators also remain clear about their purpose. That superintendent of schools in Alaska who insisted that his task, through the schools in his rural district, was “to wipe out the last vestiges of Eskimo culture as fast as I can” clearly knew his purpose. But it was his purpose, not that of any Eskimos in the villages he was hired to serve. Thinking through our purpose in schooling is critical, for if we are not clear about it, education may not lead the society in directions it expects. There is no mandate in our schools to see that one outcome of schooling is a sustainable culture.
Speaking in 1992 as part of a panel at the Island Institute on the purpose of education, Ted Chamberlin made explicit some of the ramifications of educational goals and pointed up the complexity and the contradictions that lie within our notions of purpose. He noted that throughout the history of education, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, or Australia, one purpose of education has been “to prepare individuals to meet the challenges of the world, and to satisfy its demands.” He described this as a conservative purpose, “one of sustaining the values and the meanings of society.” Another purpose in our educational systems, he continued, has been “to separate individuals from the world for a period of time, and provide them with an opportunity to strengthen themselves to challenge the orthodoxies of the world.” This latter purpose is seen as preparing the young to look at the culture critically, “with the purpose of changing those practices, those givens, and changing as well the theories which sustain those practices.” This latter notion also “presumes some idea of progress, some notion that things can be improved.”
The educational system contains two fundamental contradictions, according to Ted. The first has to do with deciding whether our purpose is to focus on improving the individual self, “independent of the priorities or the prerogatives of the society,” or on improving society “by creating more civilized individuals.” The second stems from Plato’s questions in the Meno: Do we seek to draw out of the individual what he or she already contains, assuming that there is a “best self” lurking in each of us and that “the educator’s task is to lead that self into the light”? Or do we “assume that each individual needs something from the outside, something that is not inherent; that we need to lead the person out of ignorance, stupidity, or barbarism, and that we can do that only by providing the person with information, values, or ideas that are now missing”? Ted pointed out that “the second notion is what informed much education during the nineteenth century, especially in the European empires: in Canada, in India, in Africa, in the West Indies.” He described the imperialism inherent in such a notion by showing how it took root in “a system that held a condescending view of indigenous people. And it had its influence on the developing of education in the United States, especially in the development of education from what were often imperial metropolitan centers, which, of course, knew what civilization was all about, compared to the colonial hinterland.” He concluded, “So education was often determined in the metropolitan centers of the East, and then sent out West in order to civilize the other areas of the country.”
This latter circumstance is precisely what American Indian and Alaska native students have had to contend with since schools were imported and imposed on them to assist in their “civilization.” The outcome of such a purpose was supposed to be assimilation. The real outcomes included the denigration of local cultures and a number of shocking losses: loss of vernacular language, loss of traditional wisdom, loss of a unique worldview, loss of useful subsistence skills, loss of confidence, loss of the organizing power of the tribe, perhaps even loss of the tribal psychology that it created in its members, and loss of the ability to find one’s way in the world. All those losses reinforce Ivan Illich’s argument that the humanities have been waging a long, cold war on subsistence and the vernacular—upon indigenous peoples.
When we think about the purpose of education, we need to stress the singular. Robert D. Arnold, former executive director of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Schooling, speaking as another participant on the same panel, emphasized the need for “purpose, rather than purposes.” The plural may be more inclusive, he claimed, but it exposes us to long lists. “The singular will let us more easily distinguish between purpose and goals and objectives.” The latter two terms have been used widely since the late 1950s as part of the development of governmental planning processes modeled on industrial planning efforts. They were applied to education with considerable determination in the mid-1960s and 1970s. Both terms are severely limited. They express something far less than we need to discover. They turn schooling into an assembly line over which others have control. “Here, take this part. Now take this one. We’ll assemble you according to our pattern.” What a dismal future that portends; only a stifled creativity and lack of innovation are available for tools to sustain our culture. As used in Bob’s deliberations, “‘Purpose’ is a broad or global statement of intended outcomes” and “could represent a community’s highest aspirations for its children and youth.” He continued, “A clear sense of purpose will help identify narrower outcomes called ‘goals’ or ‘objectives.’”
Goals and objectives are not a purpose, and their presence will not make up for the absence of purpose, in Bob’s view. Objectives may be important for the military, business, and industry; their value for education is doubtful. Objectives are closely hewed to obliterate any hope of serendipity, the unexpected, the unplanned, the unpredictable, and ultimately the most pleasurable learning. Some teachers learn quickly that what they thought they taught was not what their students learned. Students often find that what they learned that was most significant to them is never covered on a test; it may even have been reached by an intuitive leap away from the lesson being taught, an individual but not classroom epiphany experienced while brooding or staring out the window. Further, teaching to achieve educational objectives fragments learning and makes any holistic view of the world even more difficult to achieve than it is inherently.
National consideration of our purpose in educating our people has been too long in coming, but a national declaration of purpose made by government is always a travesty and inevitably becomes bungled when translated into policy and implemented locally. Perhaps a consideration of purpose becomes possible if educators, other intellectuals, and the public try to think it through in conversations, but it will happen best at the level of local school districts. Out of those myriad conversations there will surely be some common ground, statements of purpose whose values, expressed or implied, clearly overlap. Anything less than such a community effort is doomed to fail. A whole series of “reforms” in schools that were put into practice from 1965 until 1980 have left many people still deeply unsettled about our educational programs. Reform is clearly not enough.
A statement of purpose should grow out of conversations among our citizens, not be handed out by an individual or left to professional educators or politicians. My notion, assuming that we have a conversation going here and that I can participate in it, is that we educate for life, and not for mere survival but for a particular kind of life. We educate toward an authentic existence, rooted in the deepest nature of Nature, creating a fullness in ourselves that allows us to give of ourselves to others. We educate for a life that is concerned for the community, the state, and the earth and all its species and geologic forms. We educate for a life that reaches out in appreciation, gratitude, and love to the very stars. Yet the purpose of education in our time often seems to be defined by the needs of the state or the corporation or the economy rather than the needs of people or the community, and certainly not for lesser species or the earth. Instead of asking ourselves what our people need to know to prepare them for a future that defies prediction, we ask ourselves how to train people to ensure the state’s economic development or to meet the need for workers in a specific industry. Perhaps we will never educate anyone very well until we disentangle education from the economy, until we divorce schooling from getting a job.
We all come from traditions that once were clearer about the end of education than we are today, when training for a job (probably in transition as we train for it) seems to be our primary goal, and achieving satisfactory scores on a standardized test and behaving correctly in social situations are common and acceptable intermediate goals. Some pursue such goals even though they are not the purpose of education and may not be even distantly related to it. Meanwhile the purpose for which we educate remains ill considered by some, unconsidered by many, and poorly defined by most.
It begins to seem as if the people and cultures of old, trying to educate for survival and for intimate knowledge of the world and our relationship to it, were wiser than we. Their view is a long one: a life aimed at intellectual and emotional growth and increasing self-discipline and service to the community. Our view tends toward the immediate return: an easy job with benefits. Their cultures have survived for thousands of years longer than ours. Who has a greater sense of purpose? For American Indians, survival of the people, including creatures other than humans, was not only the ideal but was seen as realistic and worthy of pursuit. Western culture’s traditional interest in educating for citizenship, for virtue, and for the common good seems to offer a parallel purpose, though one often lacking in concern for the common good of nonhuman creatures. By comparison, our contemporary goal of individual accomplishment, defined as skills for the job market and ever increasing compensation, and our national goal of making America the world’s number one economy, seem hollow and thoughtless. Despite our books and our science, our technology and our access to information, we no longer appear to have much capacity for thinking hard about difficult issues or to have very high expectations for our schools or, tragically, our young people. Our capacity for respect, for being fully present to others and to the world, is not widely expressed now. It seems we prefer to display our power rather than our respect, to get others to pay attention to us rather than be present for others.
Though there has been much national ferment in education since the 1960s, it has been a long time since we as a nation have carefully examined our presuppositions about education. The principles espoused by Mann, James, and Dewey, and in the great debates about the nature of education in the 1930s, have borne their fruit. We may differ as to whether it is bitter or sweet. Critiquing those earlier debates easily leads to bashing the results, and although that is a particularly sour fruit, many seem to relish it. It is more important, in my view, to think hard again about our purpose, not limiting ourselves to a critique of our recent past or our apparently numbing present but exploring all the sources of thought that could be useful from every era and culture. The inquiry itself is useful, and the implications of the outcome are important to every citizen in a democracy.
If we have a clear vision of our purpose, then we have a better chance to accomplish something worthwhile in our schools. “If we have no purpose, or cannot articulate one, then there will still be a purpose,” Bob insisted, “but it will be by default,” and it will be revealed only by the products of our educational systems. Then if the product is not to our liking, it will be too late to alter either our purpose or our means to achieve it.
Whatever we decide about the purpose of education in America, Bob and Ted make clear that we must come to grips with some clear purpose and we must trace the implications of that purpose as far as we can, so that we will not get results we did not anticipate. Even for our sophisticated culture, the clues we have from traditional peoples may drive us toward wisdom and survival of the people—and other creatures—as appropriate goals for our difficult and dangerous time. Only when we know the purpose can we devise the means to achieve it. “The end does not justify the means,” Sufi-educators say; “it provides it.”