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What’s the Point of School & Education?

Philosophy Tube | August 2, 2025



What is the purpose of education; what good does learning aim at? Is it just training people to enter the workforce and employment market, or to be citizens, or something else? Especially philosophy, can you get a job with it? Does that question miss the point? Here’s some vague thoughts about it all…

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Recommended Reading:
Ken Robinson’s TED on Creativity and Education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
David Gribble’s article “Good news for Francisco Ferrer – how anarchist ideals in education have survived around the world,” in Changing Anarchism, edited by Jonathan Purkis and James Bowen
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Comments

This post currently has 49 comments.

  4. @T.H.W.O.T.H

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    Why are those who mandate, structure, administer, and deliver education not accountable to those who are directly impacted by their decisions? Surely it's because education systems and institutions are simply not developed to benefit &/or promote/enhance the well-being of those being educated, but to reflect and address the concerns and interests of those who get to decide what an education is and what it is for.

  7. @braddladd6295

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    My question is that why must we learn how to solve stuff like 5x+134=63y, if we don’t use it later on in life? Like if I want to learn about music and want to become a music director, but have to study about what Shakespeare had created and write an essay about it. That doesn’t make sense to me.

  9. @phantomblot6072

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    The point of education is to understand the world, society and/or yourself better. Most people I meet keep asking what my sociology degree is good for. All these idiots only care about money and work.

  10. @KarolaTea

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    Do you guys not have creative classes in school? Like art or music or drama? Or heck, literature as well. Maybe some sort of digital art these days.
    Back in middle school we did learn about economy and politics, however I pretty much forgot most of it, because at the time it didn't seem immediately relevant to me. Like, it's not that I didn't care, I think I knew it was important. But with like 14, I couldn't even vote, and I sure as hell wasn't gonna start my own business anytime soon, so why was I learning about different ways to structure and fund a company? When we covered the same stuff ten years later at trade school I remembered a lot more, cause now it's immediately relevant to me.
    I'd love if education was about more than just getting a job. (And I'd argue it is, even if that's currently the main focus. You always learn things along the way that are useful for every day life.) However since we are currently living in a capitalist system I'd say it'd be doing people a huge disservice if the education they're spending their time and effort (and potentially money) on wouldn't help them get a job. Like, the vast majority of us need a job to survive or have a decent life. So to me personally spending years studying full time to then at the end still be 'unemployable' beyond a minimum wage temp position seems… well, not a complete waste of time, but yanno, gotta fill the fridge? I absolutely love learning about things unrelated to my job (hence why watching this channel for example), but the way 'the system' currently works studying full time (aka no time/energy for a full time job) just for fun/personal life improvement isn't something I'd be comfortable doing.
    Also, while uni and school is definitely great and all for many reasons, I don't need the pressure of exams and getting a degree if I just want to learn things for the sake of learning. I only need a piece of paper if I gotta show it to potential employers (or brag about it, I guess? idk?).
    I'd sure be nice if education included more things that aren't directly related to typical professional skills, even within the capitalist system. Especially interpersonal skills are needed in every day life, and will also lead to people's jobs becoming easier (less people yelling at customer service hopefully, as well as improved communication between workers), let alone are crucial skills for anybody working a social job (and we do need more carers, just as engineers eh).
    The "appealing to the way things are instead of how they should be" thing is kinda… yeah, do you wanna talk about things in theory, or in a way that actually practically applies to the world? Cause if you wanna talk about how things should be you also gotta define the surrounding system that your theoretical educational system fits in. Different situations require different types of education to benefit the person being educated best.
    A world where almost all work is automated and everything is highly digitised? Hell yeah, have everybody practice ballet 60 minutes a day cause otherwise most people will end up with horrible back issues. A world that is extremely globalised? At least two foreign languages plus cultural education from an early age so people can actually communicate with each other.

  15. @dreaminderek9365

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    For me, there has come to a point where education is comparable to a racetrack. You are the racer; the knowledge is the fuel. The more knowledge we get, the more we get laps or scores (comparable to achievements) and that's it. There will be time where instead of becoming a person outside of his/her academics, our world circles and laps around the idea of study. And that is just sad. Education should not be in this current state. Education can be a miracle only if it is viewed and done right.

  16. @samleheny1429

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes. It's a long one, but John Green, in the first episode of Crash Course World History, when asked by a fictional, younger version of himself "Mr. Green, is this going to be on the test?" John gave the following, magical response:
    "The test will measure whether you are an informed, engaged, productive citizen of the world, and it will take place in schools, and bars, and hospitals, and dorm rooms, and in places of worship. You will be tested on first dates, in job interviews, while watching football, and while scrolling through your twitter feed. The test will judge your ability to think about things other than celebrity marriages, whether you'll be easily persuaded by empty political rhetoric, and whether you'll be able to place your life and your community in a broader context. The test will be comprised of the millions of decisions that when taken together make your life yours. The test will last your entire life, and everything… EVERYTHING, will be on it."
    Good stuff.

  18. @ShadowZZZ

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    If I had total control to re-design the school system and the curriculum, it would be much different than it is now:
    -Starts 10:00 and ends at 14:00 so students don't have to wake up annoyingly early and also have lots of spare time to develop themselves
    -Every student gets a free license with which they can use all public transport from 8:00 to 16:00 for free, making the way to school easier and reducing individual vehicle pollution.

    -Litte to no homework. Everything with education from school is done at school. No need to
    -No animal products in the cafeteria: A plant based diet is the healtiest, cheapest, climate friendliest with no needless suffering and death to stimmulate mere taste
    -Focus is more on philosophy and science.

  19. @jellobiafra686

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    What can you do with a philosophy degree? Get a degree? Develop a marketable skill? Nope, but you can ponder what education actually like, is, man. Focusing on careers is just missing the point.

  20. @summertime69

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    There is an arguement that education was supposed to teach content, but with the advent of the internet and all of human existance, I think schools ought to exist to teach logic, the decision making matrix and how to find information. We know finding information is also a more useful job skill than just being able to do a thing. University, to me, is about learning to question ourselves. I got a STEM degree because I was convinced it would get me a high paying job (spoiler: it didnt) but I wish I would have studied law, politics, philosophy or something like that.

    I took honors classes in the US, a faster more detailed and broader reaching course then general classes. Our civic taught us about how the government works on paper, precedents and founding principles, but I was always bothered that we never did politics, government, or history more recent than the Nixon impeachment, even in my honors classes.

  21. @Romanticoutlaw

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    I mean, we live in a society.

    Memes aside, if we didn't need to work to live, or at least work the severe hours many of us do, we could learn for self-betterment. As it stands, education is a value proposition. If it won't feed you, you may be wasting your time learning it.

  22. @a.o.2151

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    I learned about the British system of parliament last week. Not in a compulsory class, but I'm in a German school after all, so… I cannot only understand the politics in my own parliament but also that in other countries. At least a bit.

  23. @georgeparkins777

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    In regards to the last point: the people who are hungry and unemployed, who need education to be able to get jobs and improve their situation, are still at cross purposes to those who stand to profit by educating them in a certain way. So while it is a privileged position to say "education is good in itself," there is still a world of difference between saying "education should prepare people to make a profit for the ruling class" and saying "education should help people thrive in the job market." People ideally need education that suits their ends, not education that superficially suits their ends while actually benefiting the ruling class much more. Such honest education, of course, can never happen in a liberal capitalist or even a state socialist system.

  25. @myrrysmiasi4866

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    Interesting conversation, certainly. I come at this from a slightly different perspective, having done all my schooling in Finland (as well as working as a teacher's assistant for half a year). We do have mandatory courses in music, visual arts, handcrafts (sewing or woodworking mainly) as well as government and politics. The school system here does still have huge problems though and I find it extremely sad when people abroad (usually leftist Americans) talk about our schools in a way that makes it sound like it is, at this time, exactly what we aspired to at the height of the last economic bubble. We have similar problems with class sizes as everywhere else, though not to the same extent, and there is disparity in the funding of schools in different parts of the country. How much free thought and critical thinking is emphasized depends a lot on who happens to be your teacher in any given discipline and some teachers even now are quite authoritarian. For me personally basic education was a positive experience. I have always wanted to acquire all knowledge and learn all skills possible and because of the way I was (or rather wasn't) raised, there was no way anyone could make me respect authority that doesn't earn that respect. I find the idea of democratic schools very interesting and an attractive idea, but at the same time the idea of that completely replacing traditional education makes me uneasy. I don't really have an opinion against it, rather I should analyze why it makes me uncomfortable and then I could form an opinion.

  26. @shacharh5470

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    Having tried to retake the matriculation exam in civic studies 2 years ago and seen the kind of content being taught under its guise…
    Maybe it's a good thing UK schools don't teach politics. You don't realize how quickly it becomes a backdoor for indoctrination, even when it teaches some good things, it teaches them in all the wrong ways..

  27. @sussycat500

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    Im in UK(iom) secondary school rn, and PSHE teachers(the only lesson where politics comes up) sorta assume that you already know how the government works. If you say you don't you just get a biased 30 second run-down. To be fair, we were like 13, but you still need to be taught it

  32. @blood_rose_queen

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    These things (like politics) are not taught in school deliberately. Which one is easier to dominate: a society full of working robots or a society full of politically educated people??

  33. @AntiFaGoat

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    Whew, this turned into a mammoth of a comment. Hope it's worth a read:

    I'm an American, specifically from the Bay Area in California. I also am the daughter and relative of teachers. You asked about if we're taught about politics and history. From my public education experience, we for the most part had an intersectional core of history and politics. We would read historical fiction about the Native Americans and on the same day would take a test on the sites of the battles in the (American) Revolutionary War, for example. We might be assigned a book report on historical figures and how they affected society today and if you were lucky enough to have electives or get.a spot in the class, a teacher might explain who a visual artist, musician, or athlete was and what the world was like around them. My history teacher in 11th grade was even gutsy enough to show clips from "South Park" to explain post-9/11 culture as we moved forward into the Obama presidency.

    It all culminated during 12th grade in a semester-long class called "Civics," in which we took many quizzes on the three branches of government, representatives, and the voting system… and that was it. In the wake of Donald Trump being elected, I actually went ahead and re-learned a lot of things I'd forgotten from civics class because I wanted to know which representatives I needed to contact in crisis, how much of a majority the Republicans had, what majority votes were needed to pass, say, healthcare annihilation, and other stuff. I only had to learn these things before to earn a passing test grade. It gave me some perspective on how little practical information I knew about my own government.

    I'd really like to say that I value American education, but there's so much I DIDN'T learn until college and so much that other people in my country couldn't learn. It's easy to get a school to not teach evolution or sexual education, for example. Lastly, when we were all taught to "sit down, shut up, read this and take a test on it in a week," all it really teaches you to do is survive your class day and know as much as you need to in order to get a good grade. Unfortunately, life isn't a grading system.

  34. @SarkanaNightSong

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    I'm from Denmark and in my school we had a subject called social sciences where we learned about politics, the government and discussed issues about society, and we had this as a compulsory subject from 7th grade onward. But something interesting is that my younger sister attended the same school, but at that time, they had changed it so that they got the subject from 8th grade, and I've heard similar stories from other schools. Perhaps it's a tendency to not want people to be that educated on this topic? Idk… Just thoughs 😉

  35. @ShadaOfAllThings

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    Running a child's/adolescent's life like a dictatorship is pretty fucked up no matter how you look at it. And yes, it is like a dictatorship. Don't fucking lie to me.

  39. @fiberrabit8229

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    At my school we get up at 6 , 5 days a week to go to a building that we learn absolutely nothing usefull and it's a waste of our time and childhood. So when we are there we get mounds of work piled on us, we're not taught anything, and we're graded on subjects the school wants us to be good at and God forbid if I have an f in computer programing a subject I'm not even interested in I'll be treated like shit and I won't get the job I want at BNSF. And I'm sure I'll need to know freaking algebra something I don't even understand and looks like foreign alien writing to me to get by in life. So we go to school to be turned into robots that the school wants us to be. Waste of childhood and middleschool and highschool are completely pointless we learn nothing there and lose sleep over it its bull shit elementary is where I actually learned anything usefull. School these days don't even serve a purpose so is school somewhere you go just to work your ass off? It's like a god damn job! And you don't get paid! Schools are retarded I hope they know the kids going there are the ones going to be running the country someday.

  40. @Amy-zb6ph

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    I think the point of education is to teach people how to learn and how to question everything they hear so as to think about it for themselves. In the US, the privileged make it harder for everyone to get an education and discourage people from getting one because people who haven't been educated, no matter their natural intelligence, are more likely to be sway by a weak argument than those of us who have paid an arm and a leg to get educated. Our current president is a good example of the kind of bullshit people will believe if they aren't educated enough. The man says, "Believe me," and that's enough for people because they haven't been taught to ask questions about what other people say to them. The point of education is to expand the mind and to make oneself more resistant to lies around us. In the US, we seem to come at it from the perspective that an education is there to teach people how to be good, compliant workers. Since it still has the potential to do the opposite, there are a lot of people who do everything they can to keep people from getting the chance to go to college and, once you get your degree, there are a lot of jobs that you could have gotten before where they will no longer consider you for a job because you have a degree. I tried to get a job at McDonald's to save my apartment. The last time I got a job at McDonald's, I was offered the job right at the end of the interview. After my degree, the manager opened to page to where I had honestly listed my degree and threw my application in the trash right in front of me.

  43. @notyouraverageiz9009

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    Adding to your point about politics not being taught in the UK education system, personally I think this is an issue in need of addressing. As an A Level student about to go off to university and who is (almost) eligible to vote for the first time, I've come to realise how little I've been taught about the government and politics up to now. The little amount I do know has come from my history teacher, just because he cared enough to discuss it with me, and from my parents.

    I appreciate that government and politics would be a difficult subject to make obligatory in school due to various biases and the struggle for objectivity, but I do think it could be a hell of a lot better. And I certainly don't agree with the attitude 'if you care you'll educate yourself about it' especially as we're trying to encourage more 18-24 year olds to actually vote. Why should they care if they've been taught bugger all about it – the whole subject becomes too overwhelming and inaccessible for a lot of people.

    Just a few of my thoughts (sorry if it sounded like a rant).

  45. @brunobcosta1

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    The question that strikes me most of the time I come back to the issue of education is how can the purpose of education go beyond training labor force without underpinning an elitist point of view, say if you are concerned in education as a value in itself. How much of society is actually to blame for functioning in such a way that the old question I once made myself when entering college "what profession our field of knowledge fulfills me the most?" seems kind of pointless today. I don't want to argue that it doesn't make sense to go after your personal persuits. But, you see, there has to be – at least, for me – someway out of the inevitable conclusion: if your lucky to address your own thoughts by yourself and can think outside the narrow landscape of training and test-taking, thank your supporters (family, scarse public funding, etc.) because you are imensely priveleged and wouldn't think that way if you came for the working class.

    Anyway, just some thoughts… I really like the show, congrats and hope you strive more and more!

  48. @BBQJOE22

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    I remember reading somewhere the argument that pubic mandatory schooling was, referring to what is the use of education, to give the population a leveled ground and equally fair start in life. While this is a noble view, especially to boost those with bad luck in opportunity in life (such as bad parents, poverty etc.), in practice it tends to also drag down those with natural or gained ability to learn faster or who just had already learned the material before "it's time". anyway, I thought this point was missing in the video and was worth mentioning. What are your opinions on that?

  49. @braytongoodall4357

    August 2, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    One thing that I feel is often lacking is the acknoledgement that capitalist systems often benefit through specific inclusivities. For instance some of my teachers have claimed that Australia has a socialist healthcare system. I disagree on the basis that I believe it assists the economic engine and cannot be seperated from our capitalism. Similarly, I feel it is often neglected how advantagous inclusivity (racial, sexual) can be in capitalist settings. Perhaps it benefits a ruling class to have class conflict between these fictious factions, or that it is an indicator of the limitations on the ruling class's power

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