First and foremost, education is of intrinsic value. It should be an end in itself not a means to gaining future employment, contributing to national prosperity, making a living, feeling socially included, having greater respect for diversity or any other of the plethora of extrinsic goals that have been suggested over the years. Education can have no pre-determined outcomes. Teachers impart knowledge and encourage learning, but what children understand and what, as adults, they do with this knowledge is for them alone to decide.
In this way, education can be described as ‘liberal’. As the philosopher Michael Oakeshott explains, it is ‘liberated from the distracting business of satisfying contingent wants.’ For this reason, education should never be ‘relevant’. As the sociologist Frank Furedi argues, ‘Education is not, and should not be, reducible to ideas that are directly relevant to a pupil - it is about imparting the knowledge and insights gained through the experience of others in far-away places and often in different historical circumstances.’
The knowledge children learn in the classroom allows them to contextualise their individual experiences and to recognise themselves not simply as individuals but as members of a community and of humanity. As such, education enables people to think. Adults have a responsibility to educate children simply because it is better for them to be educated than not. It is as important for people to exercise their mental muscles as it is for them to exercise their bodies.
An intellectual inheritance
Education is an end in itself but this is not the same as acquiring abstract ‘thinking skills’, or ‘learning to learn’. To be educated is to know something. Education has content. The primary role of the teacher is not to master a selection of pedagogical tricks but to select from the sum total of all that is known in the world that knowledge which is worthy of being passed on to a new generation. They must then introduce children to this intellectual inheritance.
The task of selecting knowledge to be taught can be approached in a number of ways. Sociologist Emile Durkheimdraws a distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ in relation to religion. The sacred is set apart from everyday life in contrast to the realm of the profane which is ordinary and mundane. We can think of education in the same way. School should be a place where children encounter sacred knowledge that they will not pick up in the course of their daily lives. For example, children might learn how to cook, ride a bike, use a smartphone or enjoy rap music as part of the everyday experience of growing up in the twenty-first century. Yet they are unlikely to learn the atomic composition of water, the causes of World War One, the tragedy of Shakespeare’s King Lear or algebraic equations without submitting to a purposefully-planned, adult-led course of education.
Poet and school inspector Matthew Arnold wrote of the importance of ‘knowing and spreading the best which has been reached in the world’. Teachers, as subject experts, assess the truth and beauty of what has is known. Education, then, is the transmission of a cultural legacy, or, to use Arnold’s now famous phrase, ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’.
This process of selecting from existing knowledge positions education in relation to the past. The best that has been thought and said is often that which has stood ‘the test of time’. Education involves adults evaluating the realm of the past to determine the cultural legacy they wish to pass on to the next generation. As Hannah Arendt puts it, ‘Since the world is old […] learning inevitably turns towards the past.’
A conversation between the generations
This focus on the past suggests that education is an intergenerational transaction, the passing on of knowledge from one generation to another. Arendt makes clear that this process is necessary because of the fact of natality - of children being born into a world that preceded their arrival and will continue after their death. ‘The world into which children are introduced […] is an old world, that is, a pre-existing world,’ she writes. In other words, it is because the world does not start afresh with each new generation that adults have a responsibility to pass on to children knowledge of the world as it was before their birth. Education is the formal means by which an older generation introduces children to knowledge of the world as it was before their arrival. Because the focus is on transmitting knowledge from the past, education has been described as a ‘conservative project’ in the sense that it aims to ‘conserve’ society’s cultural and intellectual legacy in the mind’s of a new generation. Educator Nicholas Tate describes this as ‘a reasoned commitment to continuity and tradition.’
Oakeshott similarly defined education as a conversation between the generations, with different subjects having their own language and means of making sense of the world. The ‘language’ of these conversations, Oakeshott explains, is recognized, ‘not as the means of contemporary communication but as investments in thought and records of perceptions and analogical understandings.’ In this way, education is a form of induction, or initiation, into a cultural, linguistic and intellectual community, a process involving a relationship between adult and child where the adult comes to know the strengths and weaknesses, the interests and preferences of the child in order to best ensure their successful initiation.
However, the goal of education is always bigger than the needs of any one individual child. The responsibility of the teacher is to the world, and to knowledge of the world, more than to children’s wellbeing. Our attachment to the world is mediated through our belonging to a nation; the knowledge and culture teachers transmit is often grounded in national traditions. Through education, the nation unites people from disparate identities and backgrounds. As American educationalist E.D. Hirsch notes, children, ‘need to learn the shared knowledge and vocabulary of the nation, the shared spelling, pronunciation, and other conventions in the public sphere of the grown-up world.’
A moral project
Finally, education is concerned with inclucating values and, for this reason, it is a moral project. Although we can be critical of the politicization of education, its opposite is not value-free teaching. The transmission of knowledge and the call on children to learn is inherently connected to the promotion of certain values, most notably, a respect for knowledge. Oakeshott identifies a number of intellectual virtues that are cultivated through education. These include ‘disinterested curiosity, patience, intellectual honesty, exactness, industry, concentration and doubt’ as well as a willingness to ‘submit to refutation’ and a ‘love of truth and justice’.
As Arendt concludes, ‘education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable.’ The demands made of teachers go considerably beyond the individuals before them in the classroom. They play a special role on behalf of society as a whole. It is this responsibility that makes education a moral project.
