Education is a tool for becoming capable

Education is a tool. It is instrumentally good because it can take a child from where they are toward something they want to become capable of doing, and that gives us a much more demanding way to judge it than asking whether the assignments were completed. What changed in the person? Which possibilities became available? A system can produce an orderly record of education while doing far too little of the work the record is supposed to describe.

Calling education a tool does not reduce a child to a future job vacancy. It puts the purpose of the education back into the child's life, where employment may be one ambition among many. Reading can make a person less dependent on another's account of the world; mathematics can open a field they would otherwise be unable to enter; history can change their understanding of what is possible. These are gains in capability, whether or not an employer later rewards them.

The purpose gives us a way to examine the present education directly. Are we developing people who can use knowledge and judgment when the problem was not selected for them? A course built around following predetermined instructions can teach useful foundations, but the learner needs opportunities to decide what those foundations are for. Successful execution is part of capability, while identifying what deserves to be done is another part the course can leave largely untouched.

Modern work makes the limitation harder to ignore. A person may have to identify an error nobody anticipated, learn something the original training did not include or explain why the existing plan should change. Basic literacy and arithmetic are necessary, but necessity does not make them a complete educational ambition. We should want a learner able to bring those foundations into more difficult thought, with enough depth to contribute rather than merely wait for tasks to be allocated.

Goals give that depth a direction. A child who wants to understand a field has a reason to acquire the knowledge its questions demand, including parts they did not initially find appealing. The education can then relate effort to an ability the learner actually wants. That is a more intelligible relationship than asking for years of compliance on the promise that some unspecified adult future will eventually explain why it was worthwhile.

An ambition can also change through education. Encountering the real work may reveal another interest or show that the original picture was incomplete, which is part of what learning is for. The tool has still done something valuable if the child now has knowledge with which to make a better choice. We should not require a young person to have chosen their permanent destination before allowing their present purpose to make the education useful.

Homeschooling gives families room to organize around this relation between learner and purpose, and personalization should make that room usable. An explanation can respond to a difficulty, the pace can follow understanding and a serious interest can receive more than a ceremonial elective. That is why I started The Homeschooling Company. The claim is that education should answer to the person, which requires more than delivering the same course through a different interface.

A tool should be judged by what it enables, and education deserves no exemption because its records are familiar. The child will eventually need the abilities themselves, without a teacher there to turn the situation into an assignment. We ought to be helping them acquire those abilities now, with purposes substantial enough to justify the effort. A good education enlarges what a person can do with their life, and that enlargement is what we should insist on seeing.