What’s the point of education?

OPINION:

Almost everyone is wrong about education.

Ask the political left or the right, culture warriors or technocrats, public school true believers or private school apologists, and you’ll get different — and incorrect — answers to the fundamental question: What is the purpose of education?

Because we can’t answer that question, our policy reforms and educational models remain deficient, leaving our children unhappy and underprepared for life. Before we can appreciate the right answer, we must first understand why the most popular answers are insufficient.

Wrong answer No. 1: To prepare students for careers

This first incorrect answer is also the most common. It mistakes a good end with the ultimate end of education, presuming that stability, wealth and prestige are the goals of life. What of those who have jobs but no career, who choose to prioritize family life or who go into charity, missionary or other philanthropic work? Do those choices make their education worthless? Obviously not, which means there must be something more to education than career.

Wrong answer No. 2: To help students achieve their dreams

This answer is merely a more expansive version of the first because people can dream not only of a career but also of any number of other ambitions, such as traveling the world, having children or retiring at 55. However, the vacuity of this answer becomes evident the moment those “dreams” are viewed as undesirable.

What if a student’s dream is to be an anonymous, degenerate internet provocateur, the wealthiest gangbanger in the neighborhood, or to make as much cash as possible on OnlyFans before their looks ultimately fade? These dreams are worse than worthless; they are harmful.

Education is not about helping students achieve their dreams but rather helping them know what to dream for in the first place.

Wrong answer No. 3: To cultivate engaged and informed citizens

Many on the left view education as a way to develop future activists for justice and equity, while some on the right view it as a means to transmit our values while cultivating civically engaged citizens.

Like training students for a career, this response confuses potentially worthwhile goals with the ultimate goal of education. Like helping students achieve their dreams, it fails to define that end. After all, what are justice and equity? Why are our values worth transmitting? What is citizenship, and why should we care about it?

A good education should prepare young people to answer these types of foundational questions long before it ever pushes students to “get engaged.”

All these answers are wrong because they are merely utilitarian, mixing up a purpose with the purpose of education. When we rely on these answers, we enact so-called reforms that fail to promote human flourishing. For example, increasing funding and improving methods for career and technical training may help students get jobs, but is that all they should want out of life?

School choice is likewise beneficial, not only in improving test scores but also in liberating families from failing institutions. Yet choice helps only if people have the wherewithal to choose what is good over that which is merely different.

Diversity, equity and inclusion may imbue students with hyperactive racial awareness, while patriotic civics courses inculcate a posture of historical gratitude. Still, why should either end be considered worthwhile in the first place?

Amid all our confusion about education, the classics and those who have been classically trained, there is a clear and complete answer: The purpose of education is to learn and love the beautiful.

In other words, this was the answer of Aristotle and Augustine, Aquinas and Newman, Sayers and Montessori.

Education is not a means to an end but a means to the end. It is a way to explore the rational order of the universe, to plumb the rich wisdom of past thinkers and to continually search for the sources and purpose of life.

As we learn, we come to appreciate the awe-inspiring structure and simplicity of everything around us, to find delight in the perfection of geometry, the proportionality of music, the depth of literature and the hand of providence in history. In a word, we come to recognize the beauty of creation and how to love who created it.

A person capable of seeing and loving the beautiful can work any job with joy, dream the loftiest dreams and still know best how to engage with the world.

Contemporary education is designed to help people get through life, but people need more. A classical education helps people live fully alive.

• Jeremy Wayne Tate is the founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test, a humanities-focused alternative to the SAT and ACT.