The Purpose of Education Essay -- Education

What is the purpose of education? What do we seek from it? How does it better our lives? What is the role of public schools? These are all important questions, but first I am going to give a brief summary of the text by Timothy McMannon entitled The Public Purpose of Education and Schooling. McMannon gives the reader plenty of reasons for why we need education and how it helps us and our society; he starts by explaining that in past cultures schooling was not done in a formal school but in â€Å"the community, the family, and the church.† (McMannon 1) Some cultures even believed that education was something that took a lifetime. The essay then progresses into explaining how education has evolved through the centuries into what it is today and why it has become what it is. Everyone has their own take on what they believe education is and should be. Your parents could think of it as a day care facility until you get to high school and then they might think of it as a place to earn a degree and soon move out. Your grandparents might think of it as a place where you go to learn things that you aren’t going to need in life because they never did. Political leaders may think of it as an economical advantage over another country. The list goes on, but as a student, I believe that there are many purposes of education; it is more than one thing, but many things that combine into what education really is. One role of public schools is to promote the principles and standards of our society, which have been all but forgotten. Today we assume that school is a place where we go to learn history and mathematics, but it is much more than that. Schooling teaches us what our leaders are too busy to explain. McMannon explained in his essay how we ... ..., why would you continue with it? In part, â€Å"education must be practical.† (McMannon 8) Without practicality, there would be no point in receiving an education. Works Cited Fulghum, Robert. All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986. Hudson, William E. and Robert H. Trudeau. "Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning." An Essay on the Institionalization of Service-Learning: The Genesis of the Feinstein Institute for Public Service 2.1 (1995): 150-158. McMannon, Timothy. "The Changing Purposes of Education and Schooling." McMannon, Timothy and John Goodlad. The Public Purpose of Education and Schooling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997. Nussbaum, Martha. "Cultivating Imaginations: Literature and the Arts." Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.