Educational Ideas
What Is the Purpose of Education?
A DownStreet Community

DownStreet invites you to take part in our first "Community Forum."

Unlike our Straw Poll -- where we ask you to vote on specific issues -- our Community Forum is intended to end up, not with a tally of the numbers, but with a weighing of ideas.  In that light, we try to present a brief overview of the question, then ask you to respond with your own take on things.

This issue's Community Forum involves the deceptively simple question:

• What is the purpose of education?

How we answer that question can help to clarify a considerable amount of debate, not only about the public funding of private schools {If you haven't already, you may want to take a look at this month's editorial on Public Money & Private Schools? Getting Past the Rhetoric.}, but also about issues like Act 60, accountability, testing, and, not least, the curriculum itself.

Background:  Before we ask you to reply, we'd like to frame the question a little bit more.  The hope here is not to limit your response, but to suggest that you think about a few of what have been the major pieces to this public puzzle over the years.  What follows then are simply a few of the broadest strokes that have been used to paint a picture of what education should be.

• The individual or the community?  One of the central questions about the purpose of education has to do with whether it should aim at fostering individual potential or community benefit.  While the two may not be mutually opposed, which direction one leans in can define the curriculum and how it is shaped.
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• For a job or for life?  Another question has to do with whether education should focus its attention on preparing students to earn a living or provide them with tools that go beyond livelihood to more general life skills.  
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• The role of values:  There's probably no question for most folks that learning values are an important part of growing up.  But in this context, the question is not one of whether, but of where those values should come from.  Should the school curriculum teach values?  

Within these broad themes are many others, like whether education should educate for citizenship or personal growth ... whether corporate and business interests should have a role in shaping the curriculum and what share of the cost such interests should underwrite ... and how values can be taught without violating the civil rights of students and their families, or how a curriculum without values can be considered an education.  They also lead to questions about things like testing, tracking, accountability, and more.  But at this point, what they mostly lead to is you.

See subsequent issues for results. ...

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Lou Colasanti, Editor & Laura Wisniewski, Associate Editor
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