Is Education Simply About Getting a Job?

Last updated on: May 4, 2012 at 7:45 am by Tim Suttle

Is Education Simply About Getting a Job? 2012-05-04T07:45:00-06:00 Tim Suttle

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One of the unique side-effects of No Child Left Behind has been the notorious necessity of “teaching to the test.” Parents, administrators, teachers, and students all seem to disdain this lamentable practice. This week I read an interesting blog post by Adam Kotsko who notes another and perhaps even more important problem with the way our entire culture views education. Kotsko has his Phd. and teaches at a unique liberal arts college called Shimer College. Kotsko is a unique talent. This post is from an academic blog called An und fur sich, which means something like “being in and for (or of?) itself.” I have several friends who write for it – I highly recommend it.

What do you think? Why is education not important to our culture simply because it enriches every other part of your life? Why is enrichment not the primary goal of education (and being employable the side-effect)? Here’s the post:

“It seems to me that in popular discourse, education is uniquely susceptible to instrumentalization as compared with other quality of life issues. Getting a job is seemingly the sole horizon within which education can be discussed — even humanities scholars continually exhort each other to “make the case” that their graduates actually have the most valuable job skills of all, etc., etc. There are more “idealistic” visions of education that tend to place it within the context of democratic citizenship, but that is just a larger-scale vision of practical instrumentalization. There just doesn’t seem to be room in mainstream discourse for someone to say, “Being educated improves and enriches every part of life, not just your work life.”

Now it’s clear that people need skills and jobs and that education should help to serve that end. Yet to understand how strange it is for that to be the sole focus, let us consider another quality of life issue: health care. No one goes to their doctor and says, “Let’s cut the impractical bullxxxx — just give me enough medicine to get me through my working day.” No one looks at their cholesterol level and says, “I guess that’s pretty high, but it’ll get me through my working life.” I don’t think any politician has ever said, “We need health care reform because we lose millions of person-hours a year to illness.” Similarly, when working out or eating healthy, people are generally not thinking of how it will improve their performance and endurance at work.

Obviously you need to be healthy in order to work, and obviously working is an important part of life — but being healthy is an intrinsic good. In fact, if we hear stories of people who do get the minimum treatment necessary to get them back to work when more is needed to restore their health, we tend to assume either that they’re in a pretty desperate and impoverished situation or else that they have radically skewed priorities.So my sincere question is this: what accounts for this difference?

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