What is the purpose of education?

I finished reading “Dumbing Us Down” The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto and I would highly recommend it to anyone with kids, grand-kids or even if you are thinking about having kids. This is a short book, it is only 104 pages but it is powerful, I read it twice. If you would like to know more about Mr. Gatto, check out www.johntaylorgatto.com

I would also like to encourage you to read an essay he wrote titled “Against School” http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm
in it he quotes H.L. Mencken, who wrote in “The American Mercury” for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

I don’t know about you but that scares me, could this be true?


As I said before, I read the book twice, the second time with a highlighter. I want to share just a few of the lines that are now glowing yellow in my marked up copy. The publisher of “Dumbing Us Down” wrote a note in the beginning of the book……..

”If one were to poll our nation’s leading educators about what the goal of our educational systems should be, I suspect one would come up with as many goals as educators. But I also imagine that the capacity to form one’s own convictions independent of what was being taught in the classroom, the ability to think critically based upon one’s own experience, would not rank high on many lists.
In the context of our culture, it is easy to see that critical thinking is a threat. As parents, we all want what is ‘best’ for our children. Yet, by our own actions and lifestyles, and through the demands that we place on our educational institutions, it is clear that by ‘best’ we all-too-often mean ‘most.’ This shift from the qualitative to the quantitative, from thinking about what is best for the holistic development of the individual human being to thinking about which resources should be available to semi-monopoly governmental educational institutions certainly does not bear close scrutiny.”


So, I would like to hear from you, what do you think is the purpose(s) of education and do you think our public schools are accomplishing those goals?

gm