Education gets defined and redefined constantly, despite our general sense of continuity and ongoing traditional perspectives. One example might be the ongoing debate about ‘What HIgher Ed is For, Who Is It For, and What Should it Accomplish?”
There’s less consensus about this than we might presume, and there are good reasons this is so. First, people are different, lives are different, goals are different. Plus “college aptitude” seems different: at least we know that what High Schools in the US turn out are not all equally prepared students for academic undertakings.
We need “educated citizens” prepared to responsibly participate in democracy with some capacity to sort fake news/ facts from real news/ facts. We need adults that are prepared to find all sorts of different work in our changing economy, and we need to preserve the best parts of our cultural inheritance in ways that Americans can apply to their own lives in meaningful ways.
Below from EdSurge podcasts, written and read by Rebecca Koenig, the Higher Ed editor at EdSurge.