What is Education For?

When I was twenty years old, I went to Ecuador for five months. Never having traveled farther than Canada, arriving in South America was a bit of a shock. I will never forget my first impression of the walled courtyards topped with razor wire and broken glass stuck into cement, the guards at the grocery store carrying automatic weapons, the beggars who looked poorer than anyone I’d ever seen. And I will never forget the kindness and patience of my host family as they enfolded me into their daily activities, explained to me things they took for granted when I didn’t understand, and struggled to comprehend my halting Spanish. I remember the mountains that scraped the sky and the smell of the Amazon at night. And I remember the walls inside of me that came crashing down in the face of all that brand-newness.

To me, education is a process without end, because there are limitless experiences for a lifetime. Gradually, as doors are opened and new ideas unfold, you learn to see the world through your own eyes, as no one else has quite seen it before. True education does not prepare you for a career; it prepares you to live your life more fully.

Whether it is learning to read and write or submerging yourself in an entirely foreign culture, an encounter with something new is both exhilarating and terrifying. It can bring people to a place within themselves where the world shifts and it will not be the same again. The job of teachers and educational institutions, formal and non-formal, is to temper these experiences, provide a safety net for the scary parts, and help navigate through each occurrence and extract the meaning.

Teachers ask us to put ourselves in others’ shoes. When we read a novel and “become” the hero or heroine, when we shudder at acts our ancestors committed, take part in a cultural ritual, or even read the newspaper, we hold what we know to be true up to the light and examine it against the thing we’ve just seen. Then we make changes that reconcile the two.

Over time, education builds a mind and a heart that are expanded to take in the full richness of the human experience. It inspires valor, humility, empathy, and restraint. Each of us holds inside ourselves a spectrum of human feeling ranging through joy, sorrow, anger, courage, hope, and things less easily defined. As we learn more, these categories become more nuanced, and the depth of emotion that each contains expands. We think of ourselves and others in new terms; we move outside of our personal concerns to feel compassion and responsibility for places we have never seen and people we will never meet. We feel more joy, but also more pain. As we tap into the depth of what is possible, our imaginations are unbounded.