Topics Education

Question As everyone proclaims the value of education, why do we do such a sorry job in general of educating our youth? Even the best and brightest seem lacking somehow. I acknowledge that there are many individual teachers who perform the impossible of teaching the unwilling every day but they stand out because in general the uninspired are mouthing lessons to the disinterested, and it just seems such a waste for all involved. Does philosophy offer any hope? Thank you. -- L Pullin

Accepted:
October 20, 2005

Comments

Philosophy can offer a little hope--but only to those who manage to listen or read philosophy, and those are probably not the ones who need the help the most.

As with so many things, the only real hope for education is that people will become more willing to make the sacrifices necessary to make improvements to what we are doing now. In society, that eventually becomes a matter of our willingness to spend money on education--through taxes for public education, though tuition for private education, to pay for higher salaries and better working conditions, so the best and brightest will find teaching an attractive option, and to diminish class sizes to make sure that students get the kinds of access they need to more personalized instruction. As long as our society (and others) are bent on trying to make as much money as possible, while spending as little as possible on education (or worse, spending so much on other things that--even if we wanted to--we wouldn't have an adequate amount left for education), then the present trend of decline in primary and secondary education (here and elsewhere) will continue.

Simply put, we put our money where our values are, and presently our values (political, social, and economic) do not give primacy to education.