The Purpose of Education
One day in my early years as an educator, a good friend of mine, who wasn’t a teacher but a museum curator, asked me about the purpose of education. I was a teacher, and I didn’t even know what to say. I came up with, “to prepare the kids for the future,” but deep inside I knew that wasn’t a proper answer. The question stayed with me until I discovered Waldorf education. Finally, I thought I could provide a suitable reply.
After World War I, Emil Molt, owner and manager of the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Company, believed it was possible to initiate new social arrangements. He decided to found a school for the employees of the factory and for this task, he reached out to Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. That’s how they founded the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart in 1919. These schools have three clear goals for education: we should educate our students to be their true selves, to be good citizens, and to contribute to society.
Neuroscience seems to back up those three goals, and we should look at them even as adults to have a potentially meaningful life.
Being our true selves seems like an obvious goal in life, but it is not that easy. It is related to self-awareness, and it’s tempting to get lost in constantly trying to meet someone else’s expectations. Social media is full of this.
Pablo, one of my first students a few years ago, was an introverted and beautifully melancholic child, but he wanted to be like Marco, who was good at sports, charming but also challenging and even disruptive sometimes. Pablo got into trouble a few times trying to be “cool,” and that didn’t make him happy. The change came once he accepted himself the way he was, once he understood that he could be cool too by being himself.
A couple of friends in London have a child who had a good relationship with her friends, in class she always made out-of-the-box questions and was really creative. However, she had very poor grades, made really bad spelling mistakes, and didn’t do her homework. Her teachers thought she was very smart but very lazy. Her parents and teachers were very worried until her third-grade teacher thought about the possibility of her having dyslexia. Soon, she was identified as dyslexic, and everything changed. Teachers made some adaptations to balance her difficulties, praised her strengths, and her parents understood that she simply sees the world differently.
We don’t need to get into trouble or have a diagnosis of a learning difficulty to understand self-awareness, but we may have to ask ourselves who we really are, help our children discover that too, and accept them the way they are, which sometimes is hard. They need guidance more than instruction.
Being good citizens. This goal is related to one of the most important needs we have and probably the most obvious: we all need to connect with other people and feel part of something. From a very early age, we naturally learn how to connect by playing with others, understanding other people’s feelings, and solving conflicts. I remember when my son was at daycare, he would grab and protect a toy saying, “this is mine.” Now in kindergarten, he cheers up and reaches out to the younger ones to climb a tree.
When we take our children to school every morning, they already know that the principal thing for them is that they are going to see and play with their friends. When we ask our middle schoolers what they expect from middle school, most of the time the answer we get is related to friendship.
It seems clear that Social Emotional Learning should be part of the approach of our schools. Empathy and kindness should be our everyday recipe for success.
Contributing to society. There are many studies now supporting this goal, but one of my favorites is a study that made two heterogeneous groups do different things for a limited period of time. One group was told to make at least one thing a day that made them happy; they would play video games, stay in bed until late, go shopping, eat candies... The other group was told to do things that were important for them or meaningful things, and they would visit relatives, study for an exam, practice sports, volunteer, forgive a friend… In the short term, the happy group felt happier. However, three months later, the happiness disappeared, but the people in the “meaningful” group declared things like they felt part of something greater than themselves, they felt more inspired and enriched. This shows us that doing things for others will boost our well-being.
In 2016, the educator and author Chris Balme co-founded Millennium School a lab school in the heart of San Francisco with three essential elements that now will seem familiar: a space for self-exploration, a safe social environment to connect, and a space for contributing to their community (the real world). You can learn more about this in his book, Finding the Magic in Middle School. I highly recommend this book. It is a must-read for any educator or parent who has a tween, and it is written in a beautiful and fun way to read.
