Ask-Me Meme, Part One

divhysteric asked: What do you think the real purpose of education is?

It is like a many tentacled thing with many purposes.  The main ones, I would say is education and socialization.  What separates humans from other creatures is our ability to have a history, to have a socially constructed world that does not disappear when we die.  Our world, our culture lives on after we die.  (We can argue later whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.)  True knowledge is built upon a mountain of previous knowledge, supposition on top of supposition.  We have billions of human beings running around and as they learn things, we want them to put their learnings on the top of the knowledge heap, forever building bigger and better.  In order for this to happen, we must educate our people so they know all of the knowledge heap first.  This knowledge is also social knowledge.  School is the main place children are socialized into society, where they learn the structure of our civilization, how to navigate this very confusing world we live in.  This is what education is for - teaching, brainwashing, whatever you want to call it.  It's necessary for our continuation as a conscious, self-aware species.