The Purpose of Education: A Graduation Address

A school asked me to address its graduating class this winter, and the invitation raises the question every such speech has to answer: what was all of this teaching actually for? Here is the address I intend to give, published in draft for readers of this column.

The easy answer is that education is preparation for work — that its purpose is competence, and the diploma certifies it. That answer is not wrong, but it is dangerously incomplete. A school that produces only competence has done half its job, and the less important half.

Schools teach far more than their syllabus. They teach which questions are welcome and which are not, what counts as an acceptable answer, and how long a line of thought may run before it is interrupted. Students absorb these lessons years before they can evaluate them, which is exactly why graduates need to examine what they were taught to take for granted.

So the address, in summary, will make three points:

First: you have learned skills, and the skills are real. Use them. But do not mistake the habits of your schooling — its assumptions, its boundaries, its sense of which subjects matter — for the limits of what is true or worth knowing.

Second: intelligence without character is a hazard, not an asset. An education that produces efficiency but not judgment has armed a person without training them. The purpose of education is both together — the ability to think rigorously and the discipline to think honestly, including about one’s own side.

Third, and hardest: a good education leaves you able to question your own training when your training is wrong. That is a remarkable thing for a school to give — the means of doubting its own instruction — and the best schools give it deliberately.

I will close with the question I want the graduates to carry out of the hall: now that no one is grading you, what will you choose to learn?