What's an Education?

Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash

In his monumental book of essays, What Are People For?, Wendell Berry says that “there is no longer any honest way to deny that the way of living that our leaders continue to praise is destroying all that our country is and all the best that it means.”

I would borrow this line of thought and make it even more particular to the state of our nation’s children and families.

It seems that there is no longer any honest way to deny that the mainstream model of educating and raising our young people, the way that our leaders continue to praise, is often destroying all that humans are and the best that that they could be.

The immediate rebuttal by many to such a statement might be to say that I’m a sheltered idealist not living in reality, and that if I’d only go consider the uneducated masses, starvation, and poverty of other countries, and if I’d only compare that to our “thriving” middle classes in America made possible by our mass education system, that I’d see the ignorance dripping from my above statement.

But I would argue that such a rebuttal, on such grounds, only further proves the points I will make here and the assumptions I so heartily disagree with. 

Upon examining our investments in particular models of education, it’s evident that mainstream Western society tends to place greatest value on those that turn out  competent workers. Millions of dollars and countless hours are poured into academic skill accumulation, extracurriculars, and “success-inducing” activities outside the home. With such heavy skill-based investment, it seems indeed that the masses are working toward a definition of success focused exclusively on the ability to meet basic survival needs at mimimim, but ultimately to get a good job and make money. That if an optimal number of young humans are educated in such a systematic way and given access to good jobs, then the goal is met and we can sleep at night for having done our duty. 

But we have only to look around to see how such a murky, ill-defined goal of “success” seems inadequate to the health of society. We have only to look around at our neighbors and selves to realize that so many Americans with “all the things”, people raised with such a singular goal of human success, are yet today unhappy, battling monumental mental health crises, and failing to thrive. I’m sure you can think of several friends in such a situation right now. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe I am. 

What gives? We have so much today. On paper, if the goal is for humans to achieve decent jobs and success and leisure time, so many of us should be the happiest people on the planet. We should be singing from the rooftops at our privilege and access to the best the world has to offer. 

The problem, as I see it, is this: while we’ve been so busy making our young people go through the educational system of checkboxes and testing and measuring and extracurriculars and remedial intervention to get “caught up” to the arbitrary standards of the day, while we’ve been so focused on providing ALL OF THIS in an effort to reach a basic standard of living and put food on the table and a roof overhead, we’ve neglected a fundamental aspect of human development. And we’re paying for it.

We are, in general, educating and setting goals based on purely physical bodily needs and have neglected the possibility that we are embodied beings, that our souls demand more than molecular transfer of food and housing material and products to survive. Man lives on more than bread alone, afterall, and somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten this most basic of human principles. 

We’ve become blind to the reality that our souls are completely and utterly famished.

We are the most malnourished generation, with the fullest bellies and the best job options. 

And our society, our families, and our children are crumbling for it. 

Our bellies are full, yet ravenous hunger claws inside us…for connection, for community, to be seen, to find out who we are rather than who we’re told to be. We’re desperate for love, not love based on our “usefulness” to the machine, but based on the essence of who we are. 

Our way of educating and of cultivating family life neglects this desperation to be valued for who we are. Instead, we tend to educate and raise our youth with one poorly articulated goal that everyone celebrates, and because it’s a small one, we’re often able to reach it. Kids are graduating with heads stuffed full of facts. Great test scores. Excellent college entrance possibilities. Hurray for reaching our goals. 

And we scratch our heads because we can’t figure out why we are still so unhappy.

I think we’ve forgotten what it means to live.

Unhappiness, hollow shells of human experience, are what happens when so many of even our most erudite and astute young people know how to pass all the tests, be lifted from poverty, yet nonetheless have no idea how to really live. How to love. How to be present and connect in the soul space between one another. 

And I wonder, is it worth it? Is it worth stuffing kids into boxes all day, to come home to more boxes, to grow into adulthood to enter more boxes? Is it worth all that so long as our bellies are fed and there’s a roof over our heads when we no longer know how to live?

Intelligence unhitched from wisdom and community and character can be deadly. We’re killing ourselves.

Yet wisdom and character can only be forged in the twin holy fires of healthy families and connected communities, both of which we are sadly lacking today. We’ve been happy to trade family and community in for the supposed security offered by institutions and systems finely crafted by experts more “qualified” than us. 

We’re untethered from one another. 

And what hope have we in reclaiming healthy families and connected communities, in re-tethering ourselves to one another and our shared collective consciousness, when the peddlers of the American way of the “good life” all seem hell-bent on keeping us in boxes, getting kids out of their homes for as much of the day as possible, at keeping families apart from one another as often as possible, at keeping working parents separated from their kids as much as possible because we’ve bought the lie that home and kids are burdens to be born instead of the greatest of gifts to be cherished. And because of the perceived burdens of home, even whenever we’re there we’re not really there. We need an escape as soon as possible. And so even in our own homes we stay separated by the boxes we hold in our hands. 

I wonder what would happen if family and connected communities were reimagined, rebuilt, reclaimed for the sacred gifts they  can be. I wonder what would happen if we took a greater interest in customizing education and home experiences for our children. I wonder what would happen if we dared to take our lives back, to work together to educate the whole person, to see each child as an individual with unique gifts and talents, on their own timeline of development, let them breathe freely outside of all the boxes…I wonder if basic job skills would become a byproduct rather than the sole goal of a much richer, much more sustainable “product”, that of being a more fully alive, joyful, seen, confident, inventive, curious adult forging connection and building sustainable community and home lives in the world. 

We’ve made our bottom line too small, so we’re reaching it. We’re doing great at getting “good jobs” so we can buy more stuff we don’t need so we can impress more people we don’t care about so we can get a temporary good feeling that never lasts…this is dreaming too small.

Only when we stop reducing human children and families to cogs in a wheel, when we stop putting them into our foolish boxes, when we stop making our bottom line the production of consumers who will have good jobs so they can buy more stuff to boost our economies, if only we will reconsider what this is all for in the first place…only then can we achieve true human flourishing and freedom and joy. 

We must do better. We must put into action all the scientifically demonstrable evidence we now know about the best ways to help humans grow, thrive, and build sustainably joyful lives and communities. 

The evidence points away from all the phony boxes, jumping through hoops, accumulating stuff, attaining status. None of that truly sustains the soul of a society.

Only in freeing ourselves of the trappings of the more damaging of our human systems can we find happiness and connection, can we find the food that nourishes the long-term needs of the body and soul.

We must dare to think differently, rock the boat, advocate for our children, be the experts for our own families, and stop assuming some other system out there has OUR unique kids’ and OUR unique families’ best interests in mind. 

We must evaluate the underlying assumptions upon which our human systems are built, decide for ourselves if we agree with those, and dare to color outside the lines to achieve a life-filled LIFE. 

That’s what makes our country a good one- that we can dare to think for ourselves. But we don’t. We’re wasting the gift. 

We’ve got to take our children’ lives back from the system that feeds them the entree of all the “right” answers along with a side dish of all “right” questions they’re allowed to ask. 

The world sells us trinkets and we say no. 

We may have forgotten how to live, but the story isn’t over. It never is. The mistakes aren’t the truest version of reality. Through our collective consciousness of past mistakes and evidence of how to help young people thrive, by starting at birth, by starting with healthy families, healthy singles, healthy friends, healthy workplaces and communities, together we can re-learn what it means to be truly alive. 

We can re-build what this country is and the best ideals it set out to reach in the first place, ideals we’ve often failed to reach, but that nonetheless illuminate the path toward a country where all children, women, and men are created equal, where  they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Let’s think for ourselves and color all over the walls of the boxes while we search for the way through. Let’s forge a way out of the more damaging human constructs to build new, healthier rhythms of life  together out there in the wide open wonder of the world.