The title of this blog post is polysemic, as I often make my post titles. It can mean more than one thing. Taken one way the phrase “the end of education” would mean what education aims to achieve, its goal or purpose. In another way of taking the same phrase it would mean the point at which all education is brought to a stop, frustrated of ever reaching its goal.
I will address each of those two senses of the end of education in turn, one at a time in each of the following two sections of this post.
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Education’s end, its goal or purpose, lies beyond all mere acquisition of accurate information concerning what one is being educated about. The goal of education is not the acquisition of such information, which is at best only one tool of use in some cases, though far from all, for attaining that goal. Since such information is what is often called knowledge, we could put the same point by saying that the end of education, in the sense of its goal or purpose, lies altogether beyond all mere acquisition of knowledge.
Instead of aiming at any increase in knowledge, education aims at imparting vision, at giving one eyes to see. The goal of education is to induce insight.
In-sight is still sight. However, it is a seeing into rather than a seeing that remains only on the surface, gaping at the spectacle of whatever comes before the eyes like an image on a screen.
Insight brings understanding. The seeing of those granted insight is anything but mere sight-seeing, the sort of seeing in which we often indulge during travel-vacations. The seeing that is insight and brings understanding is not like such sight-seeing. Instead, it “puts things in proper perspective,” as we say. That is, insight lets us see things in their own proper places. Thus, insight is a placing vision: it lets us see the place to which belongs whatever we are encountering.
Such insight goes far beyond the mere beholding of any spectacle. There is in that sense nothing at all “spectacular” about insight. Insight displays nothing to view that has not been open to view before. Rather, it lets us see clearly at last just what has been displaying itself before us, but that we theretofore lacked the eyes truly to see.
Insight, then, gives nothing new to see. Rather, it gives us new seeing, letting the scales fall from our eyes. It is not seeing anything new; it is seeing things newly.
If you want to store a bunch of information, it would be wise to use a computer. That way you can keep yourself open for gifts of insight into what all that information is about in the first place.
The end of education is to open the mind to receiving such gifts.
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When schooling becomes no more than a process of training and imparting new information, schooling works against education. All too often in our contemporary global consumer society, schooling becomes nothing more than such training and such conveying of information. Where that occurs, openness to insight is not fostered. It becomes at best accidental, a matter of pure chance, rather than what the schooling aims to accomplish. Education ceases to be what schools impart when the imparting of information and the provision of training become paramount.
When that occurs, it is the end of education.
