“Education is a subject on which we all feel that we have something to say. We have all been educated, more or less; and we have, most of us, complaints to make about the defects of our own education; and we all like to blame our educators, or the system within which they were compelled to work, for our failure to educate ourselves.”
That comes near the outset of T. S. Eliot’s essay “The Aims of Education,” included in the posthumously published collection To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings.
The essay was originally a set of lectures Eliot gave in 1950-51 at the University of Chicago. What is striking about the discussion is how little has changed since then in thinking about the aims of education. Think of the enormous advances in other fields of knowledge, all of which have shaped the content of the individual classes in an educational system. In what fields, for example, would a textbook from 1950 still be useable in a college classroom? Yet despite those massive changes what we can call the Education Question is still unresolved.
What is an Education? Or as Eliot puts it in the first part of his essay “Can ‘Education’ be Defined?” As soon as you start to try to answer that question, you realize how many different ways we use the term. Which person is educated? The person who can read? The person who knows reading, writing and ‘rithmetic? The person who can read a newspaper? The person who knows algebra? Or calculus? The person who knows about Dante and Aquinas and Michelangelo? At what point can you say about yourself, “I am educated”?
Thinking through the question of definition is pretty interesting because it leads naturally into thinking about the aims of education. Eliot begins noting three quite distinct aims of education, however defined: training to earn a living, preparing for citizenship, the pursuit of perfection. The intriguing questions here is how those aims are related to one another and how they conflict with one another. It is a marvelous tangled mess.
The part that left me in deep reverie, however, comes at the midpoint of the essay, when Eliot describes the history of education:
We have already observed that the term “education” has become more difficult of definition as a result of social changes in the last three or four hundred years. We may distinguish four important phases. In the first, we were concerned only with the training of a small minority for certain learned professions. In the second, with the refinement of culture, we were concerned with the education of the gentleman, or of the honnête homme; and at the same time, with the supply of the rudiments of literacy to a humbler stratum of society. During the nineteenth century, the minds of educators were largely occupied with the problem of extending the benefits, or supposed benefits, of education as then understood, to an increasing number of the population. The problem was apparently simple: men still thought that they knew what education was—it was what a part of the community had been receiving; and so long as this education could be supplied to increasing numbers, educators felt that they were on the right road. But today we realize that we have come near enough to the end of expansion to be faced with a wholly new problem….In the nineteenth century, there seemed also to be only the problem of educating more of the members of society. But now we are at a stage at which we are not simply trying to educate more people—we are already committed to providing everybody with something called education. We are coming to the end of our educational frontier. Long ago we decided that everybody must be taught to read, write, and cipher; and so long as there were large numbers who could not read, write, or cipher, we did not need to look too closely into the question of what education meant.
A fascinating way to frame the question. We are still stuck in that fourth stage. Truly stuck. Once we have reached the point in a society where there is universal literacy and knowledge of basic mathematics and science, then what? The aims of education through 4th grade are clear; there is relatively little debate about that any more. It is what comes after that where the questions loom large.
A student knows how to read; what do you have the student read? In a society with a cultural consensus on what things matter most, that is not a difficult question. But, what if there is no consensus? Who gets to decide what the student reads? Do we leave the matter up to “education experts”? But, in this case, what does it mean to have an expertise in education? Do the experts in educational theory automatically know the best aims for education? If you look at the content of a Master of Arts in Education program, you find a lot about technique, but very little about how to decide what content will make the best society.
Imagine we wanted to set up a program in which people will learn the best aim for the education in a country. Plato’s Republic had something like that. The Philosopher Kings decide. Can we agree on who should be our philosopher kings? Good luck even making a list of candidates for that job.
It doesn’t take long in ruminating about this to end up exactly where Eliot ended up at the close of his essay. “The Issue of Religion” cannot be avoided. We need a standard on which to evaluate different societal forms in order to decide on the best aims of education. A system of thought which provides an external standing place is a pretty good description of a religion. The religion is not a part of what we are examining when we think through the aims of education; the religion is the standard by which we evaluate those aims.
If this is right, then Eliot’s fourth stage of education is the most difficult even in a society in which there is a consensus about religion. Agreeing to teach a student to read is pretty simple compared to figuring out what educational content will prepare people to be good citizens or what careers an education should train people to do or what virtues will enable people to pursue perfection. In a society with a common religious foundation, those questions are hard, but they are at least potentially answerable.
What happens, however, when a society does not have a common religion? How do we decide on the best aims of education when we no longer share the same fundamental beliefs about what makes a good society?
The educational wars we see today fit so easily into this framework it is hard to see them in any other way. Think of all the candidates for the structure of public education today, and it is easy to see that this is a religious war being conducted under a different name. We have the Religion of America the Beautiful vs the Religion of Environmentalism vs the Religion of the Woke vs the Religion of Self-Esteem. All of these and more are vying for control of the curriculum.
Is there a way out? Is there a way to craft an educational system and the content of that education which bypasses this problem of warring religions? I can’t think of one. Indeed, the longer I think about it, the more I realize that it is hard to come up with any aim of education for the literate student which does not immediately further the aim of one of the those warring religions. The curriculum wars are the ideological equivalent of the Reformation wars, with, let us hope, a lot less blood.
What happens if we cannot agree on the aims of education? Look around.
Good question and interesting article. You should post a link in linkedin. Could generate more fun responses than mine.
I would reframe the question somewhat and ask, “Who does education serve and how?” You mentioned Plato and philosopher kings. Plato also said some stuff about women and education… I would say, drawing from Plato and also Foucault, that education has to do with normalization/ socialization of populations, or how state and civil society actors want the population(s) to behave. Are there particular objectives of states?
You mentioned the need for a common religion and the problem of not having one, from the perspective of state/society. It seems religion in this sense is state or social ideology, perhaps linked to the mode of production, but not necessarily. Here, are you’re suggesting we all believe in the same thing? Some such as Immanuel Wallerstein have suggested that anti-systemic movements are quite natural within capitalism, especially as there’s so much (class) conflict. Having one common ideology might actually be impossible.
Is the problem really in having many conflicting ways of thinking? Marxists would say that anti-systemic movements stemming from class conflict led to many social benefits in the capitalist system, like the 40 hr. week, paid leave, family leaves, pensions, health benefits, unemployment benefits, etc.
And now we have environmentalism as another anti-systemic movement. Clearly, lots of benefits there too…not for individual businesses per se which have to deal with regulation, but for capitalism as a whole. Environmentalism posits that we can have a healthy planet, safe agriculture, biodiversity, etc., and envirocapitalism posits that we can have responsible capitalism to an extent…..production for profit without destroying the world and life itself….the promise of wholefood stores…. Of course, not all environmentalists want us to dig an abysmal pit in the ground at any cost like John Locke proposed. Some have big problems with capitalism itself.
Plenty of examples of improvement if we consider anti-systemic movements within Abrahamic faiths too…
In the end, is the question of education tied to state objectives and ideologies. And here again, the question is about why anyone should rule. Is it simply to dominate, as Machiavelli has suggested? or is to perpetuate accrual of capital, as Locke has proposed? Or is it to establish a system where workers own the means of production…Marx & Engels? Or is it to establish some kind of utopia in which people value life, the social experience, and learning itself and are no longer bound by corporate slavery, religion, nationalism etc.? What about that?