Education for the sake of education

I was lucky enough to speak to a group of high schoolers in one of the web design courses the other day. I’ve officially reached the age where I’m the boring presenter to some high school class. True to form, a few of them dozed off, and who can blame them, we make kids get up too early for school. Regardless, the questions asked were what degree they should get in order to get a job in this field.

What do I tell them? Well, by the time you’re entering the job force AI – or at least what we want AI to be, but isn’t – will likely make entering the job field a near impossibility for you, even with a degree. The competition is already fierce in the design and development world.

Instead, I told them what I truly believe – all your education, everything you learn, shouldn’t work toward getting you a job but instead should work toward making you a better person. I think most adults who have been adults for a while can attest that much of what we know in our jobs we learned on the jobs. Our schooling and education likely contributed – especially if you’re in a highly specialized field – but for the most part our education gave us the skills to learn, but the actual job learning came from the job. My degree is in philosophy, but I’ve been a banker, marketer, web developer, and a host of other things.

We tend to approach education as a purely transactional and utilitarian thing. A good education means making you a better worker and preparing you for the job force. We want to educate our kids so they can get jobs. Everything is focused around transaction and commerce and misses the whole point of education, which is that it should make us better people. When someone asks, “How will this help me get a job,” that’s the opportunity to help them reframe their understanding of education away from something that helps you get a job and instead something that helps you understand the world around you better.

This is important because the job market will inevitably change due to technology or changes in demand. In the late 90s and early 2000s there was a lot of pressure around getting a legal degree as there was a demand for lawyers. Millions of people obliged and over the ensuing decades the legal profession went from one that was reliably middle class to one where you might graduate with mounds of debt and be lucky to make minimum wage. But if that’s the only skillset you’ve learned, you’re pretty much stuck.

Because we prioritized employability in education, we began to specialize education to the point where even if your degree overlaps with the job requirements, if it’s not the specific degree being looked for you might get overlooked. And this isn’t to say that education shouldn’t be specialized – I want our doctors, pilots, and others to go through highly specialized training. I wouldn’t want someone with a philosophy major to work at a nuclear power plant making decisions fit for a nuclear physicist. But someone with a philosophy major sitting in a bank, which doesn’t really require a highly specialized training? That makes more sense.

Instead, we should focus education on getting people to open up to the world around them. Young minds are inherently closed off to the world. While they’re curious and want to learn at a younger age, by the time they hit high school they’re a little worn out and want to focus on the things interesting to them. This is because they’ve picked up on the trend in education, that education is for a job. If someone wants to go on and work in finance, the first question they’ll ask is, “Why should I learn about Gobekli Tepe? How will this make me better at finance?” Proper education would take this question and say that knowing more about the history of our species will help him understand other people and how and why our society formed. This gives us crucial insight into how to act within our society, and what direction we should want it to take.

Education, in a democracy, should be about creating good, well-informed, educated citizens. Should we study STEM or the liberal arts? Should the education be a healthy dose of science and math, or should we go the classical route? And to this I say “Yes.” Anything and everything that increases our knowledge and makes us well-rounded is good. The whole point of our educational system and educational approach should be that a basic high school education is sufficient to be a good, well-informed citizen in this country. The debate over college, trade schools, community colleges and so on can continue – I’m more concerned about the direction of our education and the purpose of our education.

Even at the collegiate level when education begins to specialize, I still find there is great importance in requiring a broad range of study at the earlier stages of learning. After all, what good does it do to become a heart surgeon who has no ethos around human life? What good does it do to become a literature professor but have absolutely know practical knowledge of the world around you? Our education should focus around making us well-rounded, and should only specialize the higher up we go.

The practical application of this belief is that because the job field is going to change and because demand will come and go depending on a myriad of factors, it doesn’t make sense to try and train someone for a job field that they won’t enter in earnest for up to a decade. Most people won’t find their careers until their late 20s to early 30s anyway, so requiring them to decide on what they’ll be at 18 when the world could be an entirely different place in just a decade makes little sense. If, however, we train them how to learn, how to be good people, how to be good citizens, then they can adapt and learn to almost any job (again, other than something highly specialized – but these jobs are often protected due to their high specialization).

We need to stop asking how something will help someone get a job and instead focus on if the education we’re providing gives children a glimpse into the broader world. Training people to be good workers trains people to be good servants. We should, instead, want educated citizens who are good workers by virtue of being good citizens.