Column: Schools must cover everything, from the mundane to the sublime

Schools influence students in more than just academics. - Richmond News

What are schools for?

I think their purpose goes beyond simply making sure kids can read, write and do arithmetic, but where does their mandate end? It’s a difficult question.

Maimonides, a 12th-century Jewish scholar, said, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

This would imply that schools exist to make sure children can one day sustain themselves, either by fishing or growing food themselves, or by working in a job that allows them to buy the things they need to live. Is that enough? Should the purpose of schools be simply to prepare students for work? To my mind, that’s not all there is.

For instance, when I wrote a few weeks ago about banning phones in schools, I noted that rather than outright banning phones it would be good for schools to teach kids the highest and best use of phones.

Things like learning when it’s appropriate to have your phone out or be texting and when it isn’t, how to avoid becoming addicted to using your phone, or how to know which uses of technology are okay in academia and which are not.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the pre-eminent American civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1968, said, “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”

This adds critical thinking and character to the roles of education, goals which I agree schools should be striving for, but which also become more abstract and difficult to measure.

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