OPINION: It's time to rethink the purpose of public education

With the current U.S. president calling for the complete dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, one may well ask, why even have public schools? After all, as educationist Kathleen Knight Abowitz points out, “The purpose of school, according to many, is to get a good job or career. This aim, while important, is essentially private — aimed at promoting economic gain for individuals, families, companies, and by default, the nation.” So, why spend precious public tax dollars for someone else’s individual private benefit?

Furthermore, it is supposed that the path to getting a good job and climbing the proverbial ladder (aka. individual social mobility) is by “doing well in school,” i.e., achieving high scores on standardized academic tests.

Unfortunately, recent empirical evidence shows otherwise. As stated in the research article in the British Educational Research Journal, "Problematising the use of education to address social inequity," the authors write, “despite hope generated by opportunities to openly compete for upward mobility in modern capitalist societies, empirical evidence shows that peoples’ fates remain strongly tied to their parents’ status … and that investing in education to improve one’s social position is, at best, questionable.” Thus, it is much more likely that social position influences one’s scores on standardized tests as well as one’s socio-economic destination; a phenomenon known as “social reproduction.”

Counterintuitively, evidence shows that even if your goal for education is solely for individual social mobility, increasing test scores does not correlate with bettering one’s economic position.

Yet, the question remains, why have public schools if the aim of education is for one’s private economic gain?

In short, the purpose of public schools is to create a public. Public schools (in fact all education) create a “public” whether intentionally or not. So, the question becomes, what kind of public do we intend to create? An earlier goal of U.S. schooling was to create a good democratic citizen. That purpose has been displaced by the belief that the aim of education is to get a job. Is our highest aspiration for our children to become good workers and wage earners? Don’t we also want them to be good people and citizens? We don’t want just good plumbers. electricians and merchants, we want good people who are plumbers, electricians and businesspeople.

Some may raise the issue that a school’s role is not to teach about morality. Yet education is not a value-free, neutral endeavor. Ignoring the moral aims of education is a moral stance in itself; it is saying morals aren’t important in measuring success. Focusing solely on test scores as a means to individual social mobility implies achievement at all costs is valued over how you get there. This is reflected in our communities at large today.

As Jon Valant writes, “What the U.S. needs from its schools has more do to with building a stable democracy than with shoring up our economy.” This must be the main focus of our public schools today. And building a stable democracy requires fostering democratic citizens. What John Dewey called the democratic dispositions are an effective way of living together with differences. The dispositions of critical thinking, intellectual humility and cooperation can be a set of agreed upon values that allow us to disagree in other matters.

This is a time for us to rethink the purposes of public education and how we achieve them. This is a time for us to move away from the obsession with test scores and shift the focus back to educating for good democratic citizenship as a way to live together.