What Is the Purpose of Education? To Teach Knowledge and Skills — Not Fix Everything Else

So what is the purpose of education?

How does education work?

This person who obviously does not like a lot of my videos wants to know what I think about that.

And I believe the purpose of education is to teach certain knowledge and skills, right?

We have content standards that specify what we're supposed to teach and what skills we're supposed to teach to students.

And the function of education needs to be part of our consideration as well.

So how does education function?

Well, I believe that we have to, first of all, have safety standards.

and order for education to function.

If we're going to teach a particular set of stuff to students, we can't have unsafe behavior.

We can't have disruptive behavior.

We can't have the kind of destruction and violence that's taking place in a lot of classrooms.

And I want to be clear that that type of behavior is taking place because a lot of schools have chosen to allow it.

That to me is the big turn that has occurred in a lot of schools in the last couple of years, that we were choosing to allow this behavior out of the mistaken belief that it's part of what we teach, that correcting that behavior instructionally is part of our mission and mandate as educators.

And I would like for that to be true.

I would like to believe that every student who is struggling with their behavior to the point that they are injuring other people and making everything unsafe, I would like to believe that we can fix that.

So far, I have not seen much evidence that that is the case.

People are busting their tails to try to teach expected behaviors, to try to teach safe behaviors, But in a lot of cases, it just doesn't work, right?

This student who is acting in this violent way needs some help that we cannot give them.

And I don't think there is anything unprofessional or anything uncaring about recognizing that, right?

Like if you have a student who needs surgery, you care about that student, but you don't like grab a knife and try to do it yourself, right?

Like we have to recognize the boundaries of our professional training and what we can do while we're teaching a whole classroom full of students or running a whole school full of students.

We cannot solve every issue within the school environment.

So I'm guessing that this person is getting at the teaching of behavior in this comment, because that's what the video was about.

I think there are very hard limits on the kinds of behaviors that can be handled with teaching, right?

We can teach expectations, we can practice expectations, we can reinforce expectations, but when a student has individual issues that are so extreme and so severe and so damaging to the learning environment and so dangerous physically to everybody else, That's not our issue anymore.

That becomes an issue for behavioral health professionals and behavioral health is a medical specialty, right?

We're not talking about just people who are certified to teach chemistry or whatever.

We're talking about people who are psychiatrists, psychologists, medical doctors.

I don't know exactly what any given student needs in order to behave appropriately at school.

But I do know that for school to function, back to that purpose and function question, we need everybody to be safe.

If people cannot be safe, they need to get out of here, period.

And we need to stop accepting responsibility for fixing that because it's outside of our standards.

It's outside of our mandate.

It's outside of our training.

And in order to do what we're here to do, we need to stop committing to solving all behavior problems.

Let me know what you think.