“What do you want to be when you grow up?” A five-year-old might announce that they want to be a vet, an astronaut or a princess. A few years later, the questions become serious, pointed and relentless: what subjects are you going to take? What do you want to do after school? Have you thought about university? What sort of career are you interested in? I feel exhausted just thinking about it on their behalf.
By the time a child reaches their teenage years, we can be remarkably insistent that they should have some idea of where their education is taking them. But where exactly is it supposed to be taking them? This is a question which sounds as though it ought to have an obvious answer, but the more I think about it, the less obvious it becomes. Is the purpose of education to prepare children for employment? To equip them to get into university? Is it to make them economically productive adults? To teach them to think, to understand the world around them, to appreciate culture, to become good citizens or simply to give them a body of knowledge which they might otherwise never encounter?
There is a tendency to assume that the answer must be connected to utility, and this is hardly surprising. We live in a world in which almost everything is expected to justify itself in monetary terms, and education is no exception. Parents understandably want their children to have good employment prospects. Governments want a workforce with the skills required by the economy. Schools want their pupils to leave with qualifications that will open doors. There is nothing unreasonable about any of this. But there is a danger that once we start asking what a subject is for, we restrict our idea of education to whatever immediate practical purpose we can identify.
This is particularly obvious whenever somebody asks what the point is of learning Latin. I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked whether Latin is useful. Useful for what, exactly? It is certainly useful if you want to read Latin, which may sound rather like a circular argument but is actually rather important. It is useful for understanding the roots of a considerable amount of English vocabulary, but then so is French, which is the route via which English acquired its Latin influence. Latin can illuminate literature, history, law, medicine and science and it can develop an awareness of how language works. But I don’t think any of these is quite the point. The point is that there is a body of human knowledge which has survived for two thousand years and there is value in giving young people the opportunity to encounter it.
I am increasingly suspicious of the idea that everything children learn has to earn its keep by demonstrating an obvious application. This has been tried multipe times in multiple generations and we always get it wrong. The truth is that most knowledge in inherently useless. Why study the history of the Roman Republic if you aren’t going to become a historian? Why read Shakespeare if you aren’t going to become an English teacher or a famous Director? Why learn about volcanoes if you aren’t going to become a geologist? Why study art if you aren’t going to become an artist? Once you start applying this logic consistently, the curriculum becomes a rather dreary list of vocational preparation and we lose all sense of what defines us as human beings.
There is another glaring problem with the idea that education should primarily prepare children for their future careers: children don’t actually know what their future careers are going to be. Most adults don’t either, at least not when they are children. We ask a twelve-year-old what they want to be as though the answer ought to be waiting somewhere inside them, fully formed and ready to be discovered. Some children do have a very clear ambition, and there is nothing wrong with that. Most have absolutely no idea, which seems to me a perfectly sensible response to being twelve. I certainly didn’t spend my childhood following a carefully constructed career plan and I don’t imagine that many people did. Even those who thought they knew what they wanted to do may have found themselves somewhere entirely different twenty or thirty years later. Careers change, industries disappear, opportunities arise unexpectedly and people discover interests they didn’t know they had. We cannot possibly prepare a child specifically for a future which does not yet exist, particularly when we don’t know what that future is going to look like. This is why the whole “21st century curriculum” movement is such a dismal waste of time: trying to predict the future, to ascertain the skills and knowledge that employers will be seeking in 20 years’ time, is a fool’s errand.
This is the problem with the increasingly common idea that education should be closely aligned with employability. There is a perfectly respectable argument for giving children practical skills and an understanding of the world of work. Of course they should eventually know how to manage money, communicate professionally and navigate the practical demands of adult life. But there is a considerable difference between preparing somebody to be an adult and preparing them for a particular job. The first is a proper purpose of education; the second is much more difficult to achieve because we simply don’t know what the person will eventually become.
And this brings us back to the rather odd question we ask children: “What do you want to be?” Perhaps we should be asking a different question. What do you want to know? What are you interested in? What would you like to understand? What have you encountered that has made you curious? These are much harder questions for a child to answer, particularly because curiosity is often something that develops rather than something that can be identified on demand. A child who has never encountered Latin is unlikely to announce that they would like to spend their teenage years translating Cicero. A child who has never seen a fossil may not know that palaeontology exists. We cannot expect children to choose interests from a menu of things they have never been shown.
This is why the breadth of a school education is so important. Children should encounter things they would never have chosen for themselves, precisely because they don’t yet know what they might like. They should occasionally be bored, puzzled or even irritated by something that doesn’t immediately seem relevant. They should discover that the subject they thought they would hate is actually rather interesting, or that something they assumed would be easy is considerably harder than expected. The point of education is partly to expose us to possibilities we would otherwise never have known existed. Seeing education solely as a route to a predetermined destination rather limiting. School isn’t simply the first stage of a career ladder; it is one of the few periods in life when somebody else is deliberately putting an extraordinary range of human knowledge in front of you and saying, in effect, “Here. Have a look at this. You might find it interesting.” There is something rather wonderful about that.
Perhaps the problem is that we have become rather obsessed with outcomes. We want measurable progress, qualifications, destinations and employability. the These things matter, but they are not the whole story. An educated person is not simply somebody who has acquired the qualifications necessary to obtain a particular job. They are somebody who has encountered enough ideas, knowledge and different ways of looking at the world to have developed a mind of their own. And that is a rather more difficult thing to measure.
