“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or ‘accessing’ what we now call ‘information’ - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”

Oh, my— I could go on for hours about this topic. This quote is so true. I work in an educational environment (not as a teacher. I did that for about five years and that was enough). There is a very influential element in our society that is lobbying hard to basically turn the educational system into a job training system that does little more than produce drones who only know what they need to know in order to serve industry. Using the cost of education as a prod, they are trying to force universities, colleges, and even high schools to eliminate courses that they see has having no practical value, such as art, philosophy, poetry, etc. and concentrate instead on courses that are only directly useful to a future employer.

Education is far more than just learning job skills. Or at least it should be. My eldest son went to a private liberal arts college, and it was an experience that changed his life. Not only did he get a pretty good education, he encountered things, experienced things that peripherally taught him things he never would have learned in another environment. Most importantly, he didn’t just learn a specific, ‘practical’ subject or skill, he was exposed to and participated in an enormous variety of things, many of them considered ‘frivolous’. But his exposure to those frivolous elements also gave him abilities that he never would have learned in an institution dedicated to simply preparing a student for a job.