Education for ... what?

On this blog, I plan to explore, and share, some thoughts on the nature and purpose of education and learning.

I thought I would start by an entry on why it is that we as a society educate people. Of course it is necessary for everyone to read, to understand the basics of how society and nature works so as to be able to participate in public life and understand the world around us. Along with more complex societies, the requirements for general, high quality education for children have increased, and with good reason. We need to understand how complex machinations as the internet and our energy systems work, as well as our financial systems, ecosystems and social structures. However, compared to the goals of the past century, we need to understand all these things not because we are supposed to preserve order in a stable society, or increase the size of our economy, but to transition our society into a completely new one which we hope will be able to sustain itself. The problem is, we have no idea what that society will look like, and our education system is not designed for this task.

In general, we believe it is a good thing with higher education, and we wish to incentivize people to take part of maybe 15-17 years of formal academic training to obtain degrees and become productive, highly specialized members of society.

Until the 18th century, the primary purpose of university level education was to produce government administrators and preachers. The purpose of education was to ensure a continued existence of state functions and religious institutions on which the state depended. There was little need of formal training of anyone else. Also, education was dependent on the institutions which education itself supported.

In the 19th century, the requirements on educations changed with the rapid industrialization of societies and the requirements of a new workforce to man and invent new machines. Now, a society accumulating financial wealth at an exponential pace was able to produce, and become dependent on, engineers, chemists, physicists and other specialists. Their job was to produce ever more ingenious devices, and processes through the application of scientific knowledge and technical skills. The job of higher education was to produce engineers who were able to understand existing technologies and science well enough to continue with the development of new technology, new processes and new products. However, as the 20th century drew to a close, the world had witnessed changes that were not only desired and anticipated, such as an incredible increase in material wealth, standards of living, health and longevity, but also unprecedented, global environmental destruction and cracks in the social fabric of modern societies.

As the empirical data on all our unsustainable systems for finance, food production, energy supply, and transportations made clear, it was far from certain that we could rely on the same mechanisms that we had had in place the past century to guide us into the next. At the heart of those mechanisms was that of education in general, and higher education in particular. Higher education is supposed to help students primarily develop skills relevant to disciplines that were established at least half a century ago. Some in higher education still that as we make progress in each of our own disciplines, we will ultimately, inevitably, contribute to a long-term sustainable society. Because, the reasoning goes, it has taken us so far towards what we consider societies far better for us than anything that has come before, then surely, if we just continue we will be able to solve whatever problems may come?

The problem is of course, that the solutions that used to work are less and less likely to work in a more crowded world, with issues that are not just local and immediate but global and sometimes delayed.

For an engineer, progress now is not merely a question of how to improve an existing technical system, but how to re-wire an economic and a social one, possibly through the use of new technology. Engineers need to understand why our economic systems are set up the way they are, and economists must learn to re-think the fundamentals of what it is we value and believe about progress, and how that can be managed within a system that is supposed to be "economic". Above all, we must also recognize that being creative, curious on new types of knowledge, and reflective on what we values we hold ourselves, might just be more important than specialized skills and knowledge. 

The overall definition or progress through development will need to change into development for sustainability, for advanced societies to have a shot at survival in the 21st century.

In light of this new imperative, it seems as if those who hold that their existing degree programmes, courses and learning goals should remain intact in the 21st century run the same risk as those who held on to their beliefs about the purpose of higher education to focus on theology and learning latin in the 19th century.