It absolutely, unequivocally is. People can romanticize it anyway they want, but formal education is very different than religion camp, painting class, or spiritual retreat training.
I feel for people who don't get this or perhaps never contemplated it, but the system is designed to breed good workers and sort them into bins. And its not a bad thing either. Sure there are non-economic self contained benefits, but those are perks, not purposes.
>> The purpose of education is not labor preparation :)
> It absolutely, unequivocally is. People can romanticize it anyway they want, but formal education is very different than religion camp, painting class, or spiritual retreat training.
No it isn't "absolutely, unequivocally." What specific formal education are you talking about?
Especially in the past, but continuing somewhat into the present-day, formal education has mainly been about enculturation, and not "labor preparation." That can seen clearly by the former emphasis on dead classical languages and the continued (though lessened) emphasis on literature and similar subjects. There's zero value in reading Shakespeare or Lord of the Flies from a "labor preparation" standpoint.
However, I do see a modern trend where many people are so degraded by economics that they have trouble perceiving or thinking about anything except through the lens of economics or some economics-adjacent subject.
Enculturation is just to make it so people who otherwise cannot bear much economic fruit can at least not be producing negative value. Studying the classics, if nothing else, should at least produce a well adjusted human. That in and of itself has value.
But those are the fringes of the education system. The core focus is on producing high value citizens that will produce far more than they take. This is abundantly clear if you look at the social valuations of high caliber students with fruitful degrees.
It is one important purpose, but education has lots of stakeholders who each have their own purposes.
The students want to learn things and socialize with peers.
Teachers want to teach, earn a living, get respect of society.
Parents want their children to be taught, but also want their kids to be taken care of by other adults so they can go to work in peace. Poorer parents in particular also need their kids to be fed and sometimes schools have to do that too.
Governments want an educated citizenry that is productive, pays taxes, knows the basics of law, civics and so on. They also want to monitor and protect unfortunate children who have bad parents.
If schools only had one purpose you wouldn't see the stakeholders fight each other so often. But in reality parents fight governments over the curriculum, students fight teachers over the amount of work, teachers fight government/parents over their wage and so on.
And most of that fighting goes away when parents assume the responsibility of teaching their own children. This particular responsibility is presently only available to those who build their lives around the idea of a nuclear family and home schooling. I used to think that one had to achieve some middle/upper class financial status to make this viable (and having money does make this easier), but I've seen poor families manage home schooling quite well. This requires community (a church with others who are home schooling, a home school co-op) because the kiddos will age out of your ability to teach rather quickly (10-12 and suddenly they're doing math you haven't touched in 2 decades, or more involved history or literature that the average parent may not be equipped to teach well, or electives that fall outside the experience of the parents).
> And most of that fighting goes away when parents assume the responsibility of teaching their own children.
No, because you've forgotten one of the important stakeholders here, which is society at large, which has a interest in ensuring a general level of shared education. Which once again results in fighting, as parents who are teaching their own children run up against government requirements that they may not agree with.
> The students want to learn things and socialize with peers.
No. Students want to socialize with peers or play sports/video games. Not learn.
> Teachers want to teach, earn a living, get respect of society.
This is correct
> Parents want their children to be taught, but also want their kids to be taken care of by other adults so they can go to work in peace. Poorer parents in particular also need their kids to be fed and sometimes schools have to do that too.
Also correct. Parents want schools to be daycare, or for elite families, schools are networking opportunities
> Governments want an educated citizenry that is productive, pays taxes, knows the basics of law, civics and so on. They also want to monitor and protect unfortunate children who have bad parents.
Correct. But a population can be productive while being largely uneducated (see China)
But despite the different priorities of the groups, “the student learning”, is not one of them
> But a population can be productive while being largely uneducated (see China)
China's a terrible example in trying to support your point. If the pitch is "education makes better workers" then you shouldn't be looking at GDP, you should be looking at GDP per capita, aka "Are the workers more productive in more educated countries?". And China has a terrible GDP per capita. It ranks 64th in the world to the US's 7th. Applying slightly more rigorous comparison across the world, there's a clear correlation between GDP/capita and average educational attainment.
And you have a very dismal view of students. In my area, at least at the honors level, students were pretty well engaged in learning. Now, that was mostly in order to get into good colleges and appease their parents' desire for them to learn, but they definitely were eager to have the knowledge that was being taught. By the time you get to college, a fair fraction of the students are truly engaged with the material for the material's sake. Even moreso in degrees that aren't glorified trade school programs.
> No. Students want to socialize with peers or play sports/video games. Not learn.
This is frightfully incorrect. Students definitely love to learn. They do not like to be stuffed in a chair and lectured at and forced to do rote activities. But who does?
I don't think the population of China is "largely uneducated" in the sense that began this thread. It is not rare for Chinese kids to go to school, and those schools are not only used for job training.
One of the initial proponents of public education in America, Horace Mann, saw education in a two pronged manner.
First, a functional democracy requires that the citizenship be well informed and capable of critical thinking: "A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one."
He also saw the economic side, saying that education was an equalizer for people in terms of helping them to reach their full potential.
I quite agree with his assessment. In a system where everyone has a vote, it becomes quite important that everyone have a sense of things that extends beyond their career vocation. His imagery of an uneducated republic being a madhouse makes much sense from this perspective.
Insofar as we have given up any optimism about the democratic enterprise, then certainly we could look at education as purely to put people into economic bins, but at least in my own public school education in the US, every student did get significant doses of math, history, science, etc., outside of their expected career direction.
This to me suggests that there is a tension, not fully resolved and HOPEFULLY never fully resolved, between education-for-economics and education-for-democracy. I think it's quite pessimistic though to give up the ghost on the education-for-democracy aspect.
Ok it’s hard to say anything “absolute” about the purpose of education since it’s a philosophical/political stance and not a physical phenomenon, but I appreciate your cynicism. I see how the rich and powerful have shaped our public education institutions, and agree that American schools at least often push students into rote labor-focused paths.
That said, the discussion is about the purpose of classrooms in a world of AI, and I think it’s a good time to remember the less economic purposes of education that have always been there under the surface. I think few teachers are more driven by bringing economic benefits to their students than enriching/exciting/interesting them, and secondary and post secondary education has always had a huge variety of non-occupational courses, from ancient history to obscure languages to nice math.
Overall, I imagine we agree on the most important thing: if education does end up changing immensely as AGI gains footing, we should change it to be less economic
This is a category error. You're talking about the education system as though it was designed from accurate first principles towards a specific intended outcome. Like, you can say that the absolute unequivocal purpose of a nuclear reactor is to heat water. But when we're looking at sociopolitical organizations, that have been codified through various political forces over tens of generations, through the demands of ever-shifting stakeholders, etc this is not a useful framing.
> but the system is designed to breed good workers and sort them into bins. And its not a bad thing either. Sure there are non-economic self contained benefits, but those are perks, not purposes.
I think a more accurate framing is that the system is currently evolved into strongly emphasizing this mode of behavior.
This is true, and it is puzzling how people think that there are geniuses, evil or otherwise, who have planned the educational system so as to achieve some sort of results for the society at large that go beyond the mundane.
Where the mundane is keeping young people out of the streets, maybe teach them arithmetic and some grammar. And the leaders, that is, the teachers, want, most of the time, just to bring home a salary, not funnel the masses from schools to office desks or assembly lines.
It absolutely, unequivocally, is one of the reasons universal education to a general level is a valuable investment for a society.
But it is not the only reason, or (in my view) even the most important reason.
Maybe before assuming people haven't contemplated what you're saying, you could try to contemplate what else general education might be buying us. Maybe by imagining how it would look if school was actually just job training starting in elementary school, rather than covering all these other things.
I share your view on this. I guess it all hinges on whether AGI is possible and if so then how fast is it coming. If we won't achieve AGI then education is still necessary to push knowledge further and since we don't know who is going to achieve this it makes sense (right now) to still push education for all as social obligation.
I think, and this does not directly contradict your post, because I do think you are not far off, but formal education is supposed to help a person find their place in society. Not everyone becomes plumber, electrician, lawyer, mba, or engineer. Some become artists, activists or, heavens forfend, politicians.
I feel for people who don't get this or perhaps never contemplated it, but the system is designed to breed good workers and sort them into bins. And its not a bad thing either. Sure there are non-economic self contained benefits, but those are perks, not purposes.