The Purpose of Education

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At some point in our lives we have all asked the same question: “what is the purpose of receiving an education?” Through my primary years of education, I often found school tedious and a misuse of time. I waited in vain for the day when I would graduate from high school, only then to go on to college. As I progressed onward to college however, I learned that my schooling was what I made of it. When I put forth a full effort, I received the most out of my education, which was more than just factual knowledge alone. Receiving an education has an array of benefits, but it is up to us to find out what those benefits are.

Everyone has his or her own take on what they believe education is and should be. Your parents could think of it as a day care facility until you get to high school and then they might think of it as a place to earn a degree and soon move out. Your grandparents might think of it as a place where you go to learn things that you aren’t going to need in life because they never did. Political leaders may think of it as an economical advantage over another country. The list goes on, but as a student, I believe that there are many purposes of education; it is more than one thing, but many things that combine into what education really is.

One role of public schools is to promote the principles and standards of our society, which have been all but forgotten. Today we presume that school is a place where we go to learn history and mathematics, but it is much more than that. Schooling teaches us what our leaders are too busy to explain. By this, I mean that our teachers are the ones who educate us about our government and society. It is our teachers who govern us on what we can and cannot do. Our government officials ar...

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...never acquired anything from becoming educated, why would you continue with it? In part, “education must be practical” (McMannon 8) and we need to recognize that.

Works Cited

Fulghum, Robert. All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986.

Hudson, William E. and Robert H. Trudeau. "Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning." An Essay on the Institionalization of Service-Learning: The Genesis of the Feinstein Institute for Public Service 2.1 (1995): 150-158.

McMannon, Timothy. "The Changing Purposes of Education and Schooling." McMannon, Timothy and John Goodlad. The Public Purpose of Education and Schooling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.

Nussbaum, Martha. "Cultivating Imaginations: Literature and the Arts." Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

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