To What End?

The question "to what end" helps me to understand why I am doing something - the core goals and success criteria - better than any other phrase I know.

Lately I have found myself asking “to what end” about education as a whole. What is the purpose of educating our young people, and how might this change as every aspect of our lives, economic, societal, cultural, geopolitical, is in flux? What is education's central aim, and equally important, what is the aim, divided as we are, that we can all agree on?

I could name three aims for education before writing this post: a human capital aim - skills from education help people succeed in the labor market; a democratic aim - understanding from education helps people to better participate in democracy; and a national power aim - collective competence gained through education helps to build infrastructure and technology that allows countries to compete. 

Cursory research into the Philosophy of Education reveals a number far greater, and their volume, as well as their range explains a good deal about why education, from kindergarten through to higher education, is at risk of collapsing under the weight of our expectations. 

Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies three categorical aims for education:

1. Formative aims suppose that education is inherently good and worthwhile. The goal is to educate people because this helps them to fulfill their potential and rationality, and/or because education leads to moral or intellectual virtues that are intrinsically worthwhile. These are known as non-instrumental goals, in that they aren't intended to achieve any purpose beyond themselves.
2. Student-centered aims are grounded in the idea that education leads individuals to flourishing lives, in a practical sense, and specifically in their ability to succeed economically, socially, etc. The broad goal is thus to maximize the tangible well-being of students through education.
3. Social, Civic, and Economic aims speak to education as a driver of collective advancement. Specific goals vary widely, but include growing economic capacity and competitiveness, improving public health, advancing national security, maintaining democracy and more.

We can see these aims, and the tensions between them, playing out in popular debates around education: 

What does flourishing mean for students, during and after their education? To what extent does this include a virtuous moral or spiritual life, especially for those in religious communities? 

How should educators think about their role in encouraging students towards economically productive and necessary jobs, versus helping people find their own purpose and passion in work?

Does the role of education (and educators) end with the development of intrinsic faculties, like rationality, or does it extend to the ability for students to succeed beyond education, economically and socially?

Do institutions of education, especially higher education, have a primary duty to the political and economic vitality of the country, their students, or other abstract ideals?

These questions and many like them, are, to my mind, the source of most of the fundamental disagreements about education in the U.S., ranging from the standards of K-12 curricula, to the success measures of universities. And while aims are an inherent part of all political and policy debates, in education, they are often left unspoken, making tensions more challenging to resolve. 

What is most striking about the categorical aims above is the number of sub-categories they subsume. In reality we're debating not between three aims, but a much larger number of sub aims (I count 12 from the encyclopedia entry above) as varied as civic homogenization, individual prosperity, and social justice.

To my eye, many of the aims or sub-aims of education are logical and defensible. We can see most of them playing out across the modern discourse on education. But of course, we can only advance so many goals at one time, and any reasonable person would laugh at the idea of advancing twelve goals if asked “to what end” about any given project. In an effort as logistically and bureaucratically complex as educating our nation’s young people, the idea of pursuing so many goals is simply unworkable.

What would it take to agree on fewer goals, or better yet, a single goal? My suggestion, if we did, would be Progress. 

Progress is a philosophical framework that argues for our motivating aim in life to be improvement to the human condition, in particular materially, and thus by extension, physically and mentally. It is concerned significantly with tangible growth in living standards, as well as an emphasis on personal freedom.

Running as a continuous strand of thought beginning from Francis Bacon, founder of the scientific principle, through to Comte, founder of Positivism and forefather of humanism, to Descartes, and others too numerous to mention, thinkers in the Progress line argue for the veneration of reason, and most broadly, the possibility of indefinite human improvement.

Critically, thinkers in the Progress tradition explicitly reject the notion of degeneration, a favored concept of the Greek philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, and their adherents, that we are on a continuous downward trend from some exalted time in history. Rather, Progress thinkers identify humanity’s ability to create technology, broadly understood, as well as the institutions that fund, promote, and safeguard technology, as the critical driver of our humanity's upward trajectory. 

In the modern era, advocates for Progress, mostly technologists, economists, and business leaders, view Progress as both a framework for understanding our past, present, and future success, and a moral imperative. They see the desire to hold back Progress as one of the central threats to our collective and individual wellbeing, especially in limiting the advancement of the many billions of people who don’t already live at the top of global income distributions (see, degrowth). 

Progress is as good an organizing goal for education as I can think of. It distills many of the most complex questions and trade offs of education’s core aims down to more simple ones. Will this [policy/investment] help us make more progress in terms of material wellbeing of people in the aggregate, or less? It centers us on longer time horizons for assessing progress - decades and centuries - moving us to think beyond short timelines of election cycles, or worse, quarterly financial reporting. In these challenging political times, it also teaches optimism and hope, not existential doom and dystopianism ($10,000 for a meme anyone?).

Progress has its weaknesses, to be sure. For one, it is not particularly well defined, scattered across different canonical literature and strands of thought. It also struggles on branding. When I ask people for their thoughts on Progress Studies (or organizations advancing it), very few people have heard of the idea, versus, say Abundance, which is a close cousin but with a narrower perspective (more building things, less advancing civilization). There is clearly a risk of confusing Progress with Progressivism, which are fundamentally different, not least in their understanding of the role of government in advancing society. And, relatedly, modern conceptions of Progress are tied up for some with strands of libertarian thought that depart too much from Progressivism's focus on government as the prime actor, and give too little emphasis to the (re)distribution of the benefits of Progress. 

These are real but surmountable issues to setting Progress as an organizing goal for education. Progress can be, and is currently in process of being, better defined. The term Progress matters less than the ideas behind it - if Abundance does the work of positioning the idea that we need to advance our technological and institutional capacity, then let's use that. In most of the U.S. there is general support for the idea that a productive, innovative economy is the primary driver of improvement to living standards. If we believe that, we can get behind the idea that Progress should be a core focus for education and other parts of society. 

Progress provides a means of uniting people across all points on the political spectrum around something tangible - improvement to our material wellbeing, through advancement of technologies, and the supportive development of our social institutions. If we can agree that this is the central aim for education, or even society more broadly, perhaps we can get closer to answering “to what end” in a way that aligns rather than divides us.