Understanding One Another
What Is the Purpose of Education?
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
What is education for if its most credentialed graduates doubt their work serves any purpose? Drawing on Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug cites a 2018 poll of twenty-seven thousand workers across thirty-seven countries: a quarter doubted their job mattered, concentrated in banks, law firms, and ad agencies. Philosopher Ivan Illich supplies the final indictment of modern schooling.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
“The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
In 2018 two Dutch economists analyzed a poll of twenty-seven thousand workers in thirty-seven countries. They found that fully a quarter of respondents doubt the importance of their own work. Who are these people? Well, they’re certainly not cleaners, nurses, or police officers. The data show that most ‘meaningless jobs’ are concentrated in the private sector—in places like banks, law firms, and ad agencies. Judged by the criteria of our ‘knowledge economy,’ the people holding these jobs are the definition of success. They earned straight A’s, have sharp Linked-in profiles, and take home fat pay checks. And yet the work they do is, by their own estimation, useless to society.
Has the world gone nuts? We spend billions helping our biggest talents scale the career ladder, but once at the top they ask themselves what’s it all for.
Meanwhile politicians preach the need to secure a higher spot in international country rankings, telling us we need to be more educated, earn more money and bring the economy more ‘growth.’
But what do all these degrees really represent? Are they proof of creativity and imagination, or of the ability to sit still and nod? It’s like the philosopher Ivan Illich said decades ago: ‘School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.