To what extent do our schools serve the goals of a true education?

Education is a concept as difficult to define as it is essential to our identity. What makes a person educated? Is a skilled artisan with no formal schooling educated? Is a wise grandmother with eighty years of life experience but only a third-grade education educated? Is Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard as a junior to found Microsoft, more or less educated than his classmates who stayed in school? When we are seeking education, are we looking for knowledge, wisdom, skills, or all three?

Describing the purpose of education raises even more questions. Is it to prepare citizens to participate in a democracy? Is it to teach practical skills for the workforce? Or is it to make us more knowledgeable about ourselves and our culture—to know, in the words of the British poet Matthew Arnold, “the best that is known and thought in the world”?

Even Arnold’s focus begs several questions: What is “best”? How do we balance what the American educator John Dewey called “mechanical efficiency” with a deep understanding of “democratic ideals”? Should schools impart values as well as knowledge? Do mainstream ideas take precedence over the concerns of individual groups?

Such philosophical questions are often lost in the practical realities of schooling. Advocates of accountability are prescribing more standardized testing, while critics are sounding alarms about the negative effects. We are far from agreement about the best way to teach and learn, tasks made even more challenging by the demands of the international marketplace. What information and skills do students need to compete in a global economy?

The selections in this chapter explore many of these issues. They ask how choices of required reading affect students and whether the humdrum routine of drill contributes to an education. The writers give us an insider’s view of what it means to feel excluded from mainstream education by attitude, textbooks, economics, or choice. They discuss how schools in the United States compare with those in other countries. And they ask whether the American high school is obsolete. Together, they lead us to reflect on what education means and whether—and how—our schools embody that vision.