What is Education?

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I read somewhere that the point of education is the imparting of knowledge and thinking without the pain of bitter experience.

Experience is definitely the greatest teacher.  But because of the size of our brains, our capacity to use knowledge and information has outstripped the rate at which we can teach ourselves (from experience alone), and so the species has this method of organizing vicarious experience, in the form of people who can summarize experience efficiently.  They're called teachers.

Teachers teach material that ranges from obvious and self-evident, to obscure and, on the surface, irrelevant and inapplicable.  Unfortunately, those who need the information most, are least in a position to make judgments about whether particular information being offered at a given moment is going to be useful.

Alarmingly, some education theorists who are looked up to to provide leadership and guidance about matters of curriculum and administration choose to consider student input as inordinately valuable.  We recently read about a school district in which teacher selection was done based on input from students.  This does make sense at the College level, but perhaps not with middle-school students.  While I don't dispute that some student input might help, we have to look hard at how this input is obtained, and how the interaction between prospective teacher and student representatives is orchestrated.

Curriculum --the choice of exactly what to offer in the classroom-- is a tricky issue.  Left to themselves, experienced teachers might be expected to avoid revisiting curricular issues, since the curriculum of a particular class or course is highly interconnected with other courses upstream and downstream from the course in question.  Students, in contrast, tend to want major changes in curriculum, since they feel that the less interesting and less exciting topics are largely irrelevant to their lives, which, they are quick to point out, will be significantly different from those of their teachers.  Life moves on, and is it possible that perhaps quadratic equations will be less important in the 21st century than they might have been in the 14th?  How much of the curriculum that they haven't seen yet hinges on understanding the humble quadratic equation?  Much of the difficulty with curriculum is based on uncertainty: uncertainty about what the future will bring, and ignorance of the true potential of a student.  The more potential there is, the less we want to gamble with leaving something out.

Finally, the desire to specialize too much, and too early, is something that young students must struggle against.  On the other hand, they must also struggle against the desire to understand everything only superficially.  This struggle against being the narrow specialist and being the perpetual dabbler will never go away; society needs every person to be widely- and well-informed and experienced, as well as to be knowledgeable in a number of fields at the insider level.  Only the exceptional individual can be all these things successfully, but we must all try.

A.