Three Princesses at Incwala 2006-2007

What do we learn?

With SCOT being closed for repairs, the OVCs still a hot issue, the IGCSE minefield still not completely navigated and the opening of schools put back for a further week, now is perhaps the time to ask why we bother with public education at all—what is the purpose of education? Why do we bother ourselves so much about schools? In fact, why do we bother at all? Surely even without schools our young will still learn how to live and become successful—or not—just like all of us.
The late Harold Macmillan recalled the time when he went up to Oxford before the First World War. The new students were addressed by the Dean of their college: ‘Young men,’ the Dean said, ‘you are about to embark on a journey of learning and discovery. I hope you will enjoy it and work hard. But none of it will be of any use to you unless you at least learn, before your course has ended, how to tell when a man is talking rot.’
The writer Ernest Hemingway expressed the same thing, albeit characteristically differently: ‘the purpose of education is to give everyone a built-in crap detector, so you can tell what is crap from what isn’t.’
The purpose of education: to know when someone is talking rot; to discern what is crap from what is not; that’s a pretty good definition, I think.
And that, of course, is why we bother. We bother so that everyone can learn to think for themselves and make their own decisions, based on considered reasoning and evaluation. Education is never about indoctrination, inculcating sets of rules or teaching ready-made answers to life’s big questions. Education is all about ‘why?’ and ‘who says so?’ In short, education is all about questions, not answers.
The ancient Greeks said that every question is itself an education, and they were right.
Here’s a 1965 song by Tom Paxton, tongue-in-cheek and irony intact:

What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
I learned that Washington never told a lie
I learned that soldiers seldom die
I learned that everybody's free
That's what the teacher said to me
And that's what I learned in school today
That's what I learned in school

What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends
I learned that justice never ends
I learned that murderers die for their crimes
Even if we make a mistake sometimes
And that's what I learned in school today
That's what I learned in school

What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
I learned that war is not so bad
I learned about the great ones we have had
We fought in Germany and in France
And someday I might get my chance
And that's what I learned in school today
That's what I learned in school

What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
I learned that our government must be strong
It's always right and never wrong
Our leaders are the finest men
So we elect them again and again
And that's what I learned in school today
That's what I learned in school.

The song still makes a pretty good lesson in 2007, don’t you think?