What are schools for? Yes, it matters if parents have a choice of schools, if schools are smaller, if class size is reduced … But are we not left with the question, Why? What is all the sound and fury and expense about? If a metaphor may be permitted, we can make the trains run on time, but if they do not go where we want them to go, why bother? …

This, it seems to me, is a fine and noble story to offer as a reason for schooling: to provide our youth with the knowledge and will to participate in the great experiment; to teach them how to argue, and to help them discover what questions are worth arguing about; and, of course, to make sure they know what happens when arguments cease. …

[T]here are still more ideas that can provide respectable, humane, and substantive reasons for schooling, I have no doubt. The purpose of this book is not only to put forward reasons that make sense but to play a role in promoting a serious conversation about reasons. Not about policies, management, assessment, and other engineering matters. These are important, but they ought rightfully to be addressed after decisions are made about what schools are for. … [W]e cannot fail to improve the lives of our young if all parties could enter the conversation with enthusiasm and resolve. [Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Vintage, 1995, pp. 61, 73-74, 91]

[T]he far goal of education—as of psychotherapy, of family life, of work, of society, of life itself—is to aid the person to grow to fullest humanness, to the greatest fulfillment and actualization of his highest potentials, to his greatest possible stature. …

[E]ducation is properly a universal, ubiquitous, and life-long proposition. It implies education for all the human capacities, not only the cognitive ones … for adults as well as for children. And it implies that education is certainly not confined to the classroom. …

The better we know which ends we want, the easier it is for us to create truly efficient means to those ends. If we are not clear about those ends, or deny that there are any, then we are doomed to confusion of instruments. We can’t speak about efficiency unless we know efficiency for what. (I want to quote again that veritable symbol of our times, the test pilot who radioed back, “I’m lost, but I’m making record time.”)

[E]ducation—like all our social institutions—must be concerned with its final values, and this in turn is just about the same as speaking of what have been called “spiritual values” or “higher values.” These are the principles of choice which help us to answer the age-old “spiritual” (philosophical? religious? humanistic? ethical?) questions: What is the good life? … What is the good society and what is my relation to it? What are my obligations to society? What is best for my children? What is justice? Truth? Virtue? What is my relation to nature, to death, to aging, to pain, to illness? How can I live a zestful, enjoyable, meaningful life? [Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences, (Ohio State University Press, 1964), (1, 2, 3)]

How to live?—that is the essential question for us. Not how to live in the mere material sense only, but in the widest sense. … In what way to treat the body; in what way to treat the mind; in what way to manage our affairs; in what way to bring up a family; in what way to behave as a citizen; in what way to utilize all those sources of happiness which nature supplies—how to use all our faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and others—how to live completely? And this being the great thing needful for us to learn, is, by consequence, the great thing which education has to teach. [Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical, 1860, D. Appleton, 1896, p. 26, https://archive.org/details/spencereducation00spen]

[E]ducation is not merely schooling. It is a lifelong discipline of the individual by himself, encouraged by a reasonable opportunity to lead a good life. Education here is synonymous with civilization … but civilization is a long slow process which cannot be “given” in a short course.

No one in his senses would affirm that Schooling is the hope of the world. But to say this is to show up the folly of perpetually confusing Education with the work of the schools; the folly of believing against all evidence that by taking boys and girls for a few hours each day between the ages of seven and twenty-one, our teachers can “turn out” all the human products that we like to fancy when we are disgusted with ourselves and our neighbors. …

The whole mass of recrimination, disappointment, and dissatisfaction which this country is now suffering about its schools comes from using the ritual word “Education” so loosely and so frequently. It covers abysses of emptiness. Everybody cheats by using it, cheats others and cheats himself. The idea abets false ambitions. [Jacques Barzun, Teacher In America, 1945, Liberty Fund, 1981, pp. 9-10]

Throughout the centuries, five theories of education have been most popularly accepted by philosophers and schools. Each prescribes different answers to the questions of Purpose, Content, and Method. To formulate a proper philosophy of education, an evaluation of these approaches is both instructive and necessary. …

Classical Theory. Education is essentially the communication of factual knowledge. … The test of success: How much has [the student] learned?

Socialization Theory. … [T]he purpose of education is to train children in social adjustment, enabling them to become useful members of the group, the community, and society. … The test of success: How well does he relate to others?

Child-Centered Theory. Education is a means of individuating the child. The purpose of education is to enable the child to discover, realize, and fulfill his own self. … The test of success: How independent is he?

Moral or Behavioral Theory. Education is essentially a means of developing morality in the child. Different terms may be substituted for the word morality: virtue, conscience, a sense of values, good character, good habits, proper pleasures, right emotions, mental health. … The test of success: How good is his character?

Cognitive Theory. … [E]ducation is essentially training in … the methods of thinking, of using reason, of using one’s intelligence. … [The] focus is training the child how to use his mind and how to think critically. … The test of success: How effective are his thinking skills? …

Your first reaction to evaluating these five theories may be that it is ridiculous to have to choose. You want your child to know something, to get along with others, to be an individual, to be moral, and to think correctly, so why sit and agonize about which theory is the best? …

We are looking for the primary, the root on which everything else is going to be built. When you are at the level of primaries, you cannot choose everything, despite the fact that some aspects may be good or desirable. … Each of these theories … as the primary … dictates the entire approach to education, both in method and content. [Leonard Peikoff, Teaching Johnny to Think: A Philosophy of Education Based on the Principles of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, edited by Marlene Trollope, Ayn Rand Institute, 2014, pp. 4-8]

This is in fact the test and the use of a human being’s education, that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind. [Jacques Barzun, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, Chicago UP, 1991, p. 216]

You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life. [Judith Shapiro, former president of Barnard College] quoted by [Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Princeton UP, 2012, p. 33]

The highest function of education, I maintain, is to help people understand the meaning of their lives, and become more sensitive to the meaning of other people’s lives and relate to them more fully. Education increases the range and complexity of relationships that make sense to us, to which we can contribute, and on which we can bring to bear competent ethical and practical judgment. If we are to transcend our own immediate environment, we must have access to the record of past and present, learn the skills needed to interpret it, and learn to tell good data from poor, whether it be the empirical data of the sciences or the moral and aesthetic data of the humanities. We must be able to read, and to know where what we read fits into the structure of human experience; and to write with enough subtlety and complexity to convey the special quality of our mind to others. We must explore, and we must have the privacy and authority necessary to protect ourselves from intrusion if we are to use our energy for exploration rather than defense. …

This kind of education is merely what we have always called liberal, in the sense of education appropriate to free men. [Edgar Friedenberg, Coming of Age in America: Growth and Acquiescence, Vintage / Random House, 1965, pp. 221-224]

The aim of education is to cultivate the individual’s capacities for mental growth and moral development; to help him acquire the intellectual and moral virtues requisite for a good human life, spent publicly in political action or service and privately in a noble or honorable use of free time for the creative pursuits of leisure, among which continued learning throughout life is preeminent.

Guided by the aim of education just stated, basic schooling must be liberal in character; that is, a preparation for liberty or a life of freedom—the political freedom enjoyed by citizens (or the ruling class in society) and the economic freedom of time free for the pursuits of leisure, time free from labor in the production of wealth and time free for political activity and intellectual or artistic pursuits. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, p. 120]

[E]ducation is more than information, or skill, or propaganda. In each age education must take into account the condition of the age. But the educated mind is not a mere creature of its own time. Education is emancipation from herd opinion, self-mastery, capacity for self-criticism, suspended judgment, and urbanity … I use the term ‘liberal’ not in the political sense, as if it meant half measures, but in its original sense meaning by a liberal education the kind of education which sets the mind free from the servitude of the crowd and from vulgar self-interests. [Everett Dean Martin, The Meaning of a Liberal Education, 1922] quoted by [Ernest Becker, Beyond Alienation: A Philosophy of Education for the Crisis of Democracy, George Braziller, 1967, pp. 34-35]

[I]t is within our power to tell our children … the absolute truth. They will have succeeded if they discover something they love doing and learn how to do it well. To say that this accomplishment is more important than making a lot of money and more important than fame or prestige is not idealism. For those of us who have been lucky enough to be happy in our adult vocations or avocations, it is the reality of our lives.

Educational success needs to be redefined accordingly. The goal of education is to bring children into adulthood having discovered things they enjoy doing and doing them at the outermost limits of their potential. The goal applies equally to every child, across the entire range of every ability. There are no first-class and second-class ways to enjoy the exercise of our realized capacities. It is a quintessentially human satisfaction, and its universality can connect us all. Opening the door to that satisfaction is what real education does. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, p. 168]

Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play—work you do so easily that it restores you as you go. Randall Jarrell once said that if he were a rich man, he would pay money to teach poetry to students. (I would, too, for what it’s worth.) In saying that, he (like my father) hinted in the direction of a profound and true theory of learning. [Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, Bloomsbury USA, 2013, p. 66]

It will be the task of education to help each individual to find within himself that activity that will make him most happy, his life most filled with interest and that will then surely contribute to the happiness and interest of others as well. [Isaac Asimov, “Our Future in Education,” The Tyrannosaurus Prescription, Prometheus, 1989, p. 17]

“The true object of education,” wrote William Godwin in the first sentence of his Enquirer (1797), “like that of every other moral process, is the generation of happiness.” I know of no better definition of the aim of education, but like all definitions, it is regressive, throwing us back on the need for further definitions. …

Happiness is an individual affair. … [But] as Godwin went on to say, man is a social being. “In society the interests of individuals are intertwisted with each other, and cannot be separated. Men should be taught to assist each other.” In other words, a factor in individual happiness is mutual aid, and these two aspects of man’s existence are interdependent. Education is the process of their adjustment. …

All the possible words we may use to express the purpose of education … reduce to two complementary processes, which we can best describe as “individual growth” and “social initiation.” …

It is very necessary, of course, to deepen the concept of happiness, because we all soon discover how impermanent is the sense of well-being which comes from good nourishment, a pleasant environment, adequate means and perfect health. Happiness, in a word, is psychological, and all material riches are worthless unless we have peace of mind. This was realized by the ancient philosophers, by Confucius and Lâo-tse, by Socrates and Aristotle; and they therefore defined happiness in some such words as did Aristotle, who said that it is “an activity of the soul in accordance with perfect virtue.” But that, again, is merely a definition which demands further definitions, and so Aristotle had to define what he meant by virtue. … Wisdom and understanding, knowing how to act or behave in given circumstances, the science of life—that is one aspect of virtue; but a man may have all this knowledge but not be able to control his own impulses and desires. He may have perfect understanding, but be a creature of bad habits. Knowledge and self-discipline are therefore two different aspects of virtue, both essential to happiness and both to be learned in the normal course of education. [Herbert Read, Education for Peace, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949, pp. 109-111, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.89306]

[E]ducation must be conceived as aiding young humans in learning to use the tools of meaning making and reality construction, to better adapt to the world in which they find themselves and to help in the process of changing it as required. [Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education, Harvard UP, 1996, pp. 19-20]

Discovering meaning for yourself as well as discovering satisfying purpose for yourself, is a big part of what education is. [John Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society, 2005, p. 62]

Too much apparatus, like too much bureaucracy, only inhibits the natural flow [of teaching and learning]. Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education. If teachers do not have the time, the incentive, or the wit to provide that; if students are too demoralized, bored or distracted to muster the attention their teachers need of them, then that is the educational problem which has to be solved—and solved from inside the experience of the teachers and the students. [Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking, Pantheon, 1986, pp. 62-63] quoted by [Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Vintage, 1995, pp. 26-27]

The hard task of education is to liberate and strengthen a youth’s initiative, and at the same time to see to it that he knows what is necessary to cope with the on-going activities and culture of society, so that his initiative can be relevant. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, pp. 139-140]

I don’t think education is basically a technological problem. It is a problem of drawing out of each youngster the best he has to give and of helping him to see the world he is involved in clearly enough to become himself—among other people—in it, while teaching him the skills he will need in the process. This is a custom operation, not for the assembly line … [Edgar Friedenberg, The Dignity of Youth and Other Atavisms, Beacon, 1965, p. 204]

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 young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. [Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, 1961, Penguin, 1977, p. 196]

Education is not acquiring a stock of ready-made ideas, images, sentiments, beliefs, and so forth; it is learning to look, to listen, to think, to feel, to imagine, to believe, to understand, to choose and to wish. It is a postulant to a human condition learning to recognize himself as a human being in the only way in which this is possible: namely, by seeing himself in the mirror of an inheritance of human understandings and activities and thus himself acquiring … the ability to throw back upon the world his own version of a human being in conduct which is both a self-disclosure and a self-enactment. [Michael Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, Yale UP, 1989, pp. 66-67]

The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust; to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Education,” The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 10, 1909, pp. 133-134, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/emerson-the-works-of-ralph-waldo-emerson-vol-10-lectures-and-biographical-sketches]

“Our ultimate educational objective is a self-starting, self-criticizing, and self-nourishing mind—a mind that can function powerfully, creatively, and wisely under its own steam” [Theodore M. Greene, Liberal Education Reconsidered, 1953, p. 29]. A man, in other words, who could freely dispose of his own energies, beholden to no one in any uncritical or slavish way—a man who would inject the continually fresh and new into the world. Democratic man, in the original and now-lost meaning of the term. [Ernest Becker, Beyond Alienation: A Philosophy of Education for the Crisis of Democracy, George Braziller, 1967, pp. 35-36]

Because he helped to write the story, Thomas Jefferson, the Moses of the great democracy-god, knew what schools were for—to ensure that citizens would know when and how to protect their liberty. … It would not have come easily to the mind of such a man, as it does to political leaders today, that the young should be taught to read exclusively for the purpose of increasing their economic productivity. Jefferson had a more profound god to serve. [Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Vintage, 1995, p. 13]

The educational end and the ultimate test of the value of what is learned is its use and application in carrying on and improving the common life of all. …

It is true that the aim of education is development of individuals to the utmost of their potentialities. But this statement in isolation leaves unanswered the question as to what is the measure of the development. A society of free individuals in which all, through their own work, contribute to the liberation and enrichment of the lives of others, is the only environment in which any individual can really grow normally to his full stature. [John Dewey, “The Need for a Philosophy of Education,” 1934, John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings, edited by Reginald D. Archambault, 1964, Chicago UP, 1974, pp. 11-12]

The task of education is to arouse the desire in another human being for wanting to exist in the world in a grown-up way. … [i.e.] not thinking of yourself and your desires as the center of the universe; … [asking:] Is what I desire, desirable? Is it what I should desire … for my own life, and my life with others on this planet? [Gert Biesta, “The Beautiful Risk of Education,” YouTube, uploaded by HKW 100 Years of Now, 8 June 2017, 22:50, 33:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMqFcVoXnTI]

Social union, social discipline, social morale—whatever we like to call that sense of belonging to one another, of living in perfect brotherhood—that is or should be the aim of education. [Herbert Read, Education for Peace, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949, p. 60, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.89306]

To achieve the desired quality of democratic education, a one-track system of public schooling for twelve years must aim directly at three main objectives and make every effort to achieve them to a satisfactory degree. …

The first of these objectives … relates to that aspect of adult life which we call personal growth or self-improvement—mental, moral, and spiritual. Every child should be able to look forward not only to growing up but also to continued growth in all human dimensions throughout life. All should aspire to make as much of their powers as they can. Basic schooling should prepare them to take advantage of every opportunity for personal development that our society offers.

A second main objective has to do with another side of adult life—the individual’s role as an enfranchised citizen of this republic. Citizens are the principal and permanent rulers of our society. Those elected to public office for a term of years are instrumental and transient rulers—in the service of the citizenry and responsible to the electorate.

The reason why universal suffrage in a true democracy calls for universal public schooling is that the former without the latter produces an ignorant electorate and amounts to a travesty of democratic institutions and processes. … Hence, the second objective of basic schooling—an adequate preparation for discharging the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.

This requires not only the cultivation of the appropriate civic virtues, but also a sufficient understanding of the framework of our government and of its fundamental principles.

The third main objective takes account of the adult’s need to earn a living in one or another occupation.

The twelve years of basic schooling must prepare them for this task, not by training them for one or another particular job in our industrial economy, but by giving them the basic skills that are common to all work in a society such as ours.

Here then are the three common callings to which all our children are destined: to earn a living in an intelligent and responsible fashion, to function as intelligent and responsible citizens, and to make both of these things serve the purpose of leading intelligent and responsible lives—to enjoy as fully as possible all the goods that make a human life as good as it can be. [Mortimer J. Adler, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto, 1982, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 1998, pp. 16-18]

What basic purposes of education should the culture of schools fulfill? In my view, there are four: economic, cultural, social, and personal. …

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent, … understand and appreciate their own culture and to respect the diversity of others, … become active and compassionate citizens, … [and] engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. [Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education, Viking, 2015, pp. 45-51]

The proper starting point is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. … As I see it, the four basic purposes [economic, cultural, social, and personal] suggest eight core competencies that schools should facilitate if they are really going to help students succeed in their lives. …

Curiosity—the ability to ask questions and explore how the world works. … Creativity—the ability to generate new ideas and to apply them in practice. … Criticism—the ability to analyze information and ideas and to form reasoned arguments and judgments. … Communication—the ability to express thoughts and feelings clearly and confidently in a range of media and forms. … Collaboration—the ability to work constructively with others. … Compassion—the ability to empathize with others and to act accordingly. … Composure—the ability to connect with the inner life of feeling and develop a sense of personal harmony and balance. … Citizenship—the ability to engage constructively with society and to participate in the processes that sustain it. [Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education, Viking, 2015, pp. 135-140]

The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence. The attempts of schools and colleges to encompass far more than they can handle are an important part of the reason why they are handling education so poorly. [Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, Free Press, 1993, pp. 17-18]

The school should always have as its aim that the young man leave it as a harmonious personality, not as a specialist. This in my opinion is true in a certain sense even for technical schools, whose students will devote themselves to a quite definite profession. The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge. [Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, Three Rivers, 1982, p. 64]

Now, what is the significance of life? What are we living and struggling for? If we are being educated merely to achieve distinction, to get a better job, to be more efficient, to have wider domination over others, then our lives will be shallow and empty. If we are being educated only to be scientists, to be scholars wedded to books, or specialists addicted to knowledge, then we shall be contributing to the destruction and misery of the world.

Though there is a higher and wider significance to life, of what value is our education if we never discover it? We may be highly educated, but if we are without deep integration of thought and feeling, our lives are incomplete, contradictory and torn with many fears; and as long as education does not cultivate an integrated outlook on life, it has very little significance. [Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life, HarperCollins, 1953, p. 11]

[E]ducation, in the true sense, is the understanding of oneself, for it is within each one of us that the whole of existence is gathered.

What we now call education is a matter of accumulating information and knowledge from books, which anyone can do who can read. Such education offers a subtle form of escape from ourselves and, like all escapes, it inevitably creates increasing misery. [Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life, HarperCollins, 1953, p. 17]

Education is the guidance of the individual towards a comprehension of the art of life; and by the art of life I mean the most complete achievement of varied activity expressing the potentialities of that living creature in the face of its actual environment. This completeness of achievement involves an artistic sense, subordinating the lower to the higher possibilities of the indivisible personality. Science, art, religion, morality, take their rise from this sense of values within the structure of being. Each individual embodies an adventure of existence. The art of life is the guidance of this adventure. [Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Williams and Norgate, 1955, p. 61]