Purpose of Education

Is it for understanding to gain wisdom for future applications or is it just for memorising data for scoring in exams ?

I would think the purpose would be along the lines of equipping and preparing the young for the human experience. In short, wisdom and independence.

"A change will have to be made especially in the present method of teaching history. There is probably hardly any people that learns more history than the German people; but there can hardly be a*people that applies it to less advantage than our people. If politics is history in the making, then our education in history is condemned by our kind of political activity. Here, too, it will not do to complain about the wretched results of our political achievements, if one is not determined to care for a better education for politics.

The result of our present teaching in history is, in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, a miserable one. A few dates, birth figures and names usually remain, while a great, clear line is completely missing. All essentials which would really count are not taught at all, but it is left to the more or less ingenious disposition of the individual to find the inner motives out of the flood of dates, in the order of events. One may protest against this bitter state-

The main value lies in recognising the great lines of development. The more the lessons are restricted to this, the more it is to be hoped that benefit will arise out of this for the individual later on, which, summed up, is beneficial also to the community. For one does not learn history merely in order to know what has been, but one learns history in order to make it a teacher for the future and for the continued existence of one's own nationality. This is the end, and the history lessons are only a means to it. But today here, too, the means have become the end, the end itself is completely ignored. One must not say that a thorough study of history demands the occupation with all these details as only out of them a great line can be established. To establish this line is the task of the particular science in question.

Instruction in world history in the so-called high schools is even today in a very sorry condition. Few teachers understand that the aim of studying history can never be to learn historical dates and events by heart and recite them by rote; that what matters is not whether the child knows exactly when this or that battle was fought, when a general was born, or even when a monarch (usually a very insignificant one) came into the crown of his forefathers. No, by the living God, this is very unimportant.

To 'learn' history means to seek and find the forces which are the causes leading to those effects which we subsequently perceive as historical events."

― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“It is often asserted that education is breaking down because of overspecialisation. But this is only a partial and misleading diagnosis. Specialisation is not in itself a faulty principle of education. What would be the alternative - an amateurish smattering of all major subjects? Or a lengthy studium generale in which men are forced to spend their time sniffing at subjects which they do not wish to pursue, while they are being kept away from what they want to learn? This cannot be the right answer, since it can only lead to the type of intellectual man, whom Cardinal Newman castigated -'an intellectual man, as the world now conceives of him. ,..one who is full of "views" on all subjects of philosophy, on all matters of the day'. Such 'viewiness' is a sign of ignorance rather than knowledge. 'Shall I teach you the meaning of knowledge?' said Confucius. 'When you know a thing to recognise that you know it, and when you do not, to know that you do not know - that is knowledge.' What is at fault is not specialisation, but the lack of depth with which the subjects are usually presented, and the absence of meta- physical awareness. The sciences are being taught without any awareness of the presuppositions of science, of the meaning and significance of scientific laws, and of the place occupied by the natural sciences within the whole cosmos of human thought. The result is that the presuppositions of science are normally mistaken for its findings. Economics is being taught without any awareness of the view of human nature that underlies present-day economic theory.”

"What is the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity. standard of living, self-realisation, fulfilment? Is it a matter of goods, or of people? "

"If so much reliance is today being placed in the power of education to enable ordinary people to cope with the problems thrown up by scientific and technological progress, then there must be something more to education than Lord Snow suggests. Science and engineering produce 'know-how'; but 'know-how' is nothing by itself; it is a means without an end, a mere potentiality, an unfinished sentence. 'Know-how' is no more a culture than a piano is music. Can education help us to finish the sentence, to turn the potentiality into a reality to the benefit of man? To do so, the task of education would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives. There is no doubt also the need to transmit know-how but this must take second place, for it is obviously somewhat foolhardy to put great powers into the hands of people without making sure that they have a reasonable idea of what to do

with them. At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom."

― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered