In his book 'What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated?'
Kohn asks deep questions about the nature, function and
goal of education that have no satisfactory answers. Are you well-educated
because you know a lot? Or is it because you know something really well? Was
your school better than the others? Maybe you just know a few things but were
never taught any of them?
As a result of this vagueness, there persists
troubling measures of educational competency. Some of the prominent measures
are standardized test results, number of acquired job skills or even knowledge
acquired barring critical thinking. Measuring a student's educational
competency by these narrow parameters is dangerously close to measuring their worth as
laborers. The information required to do well on a standardized test can be
both acquired and lost quickly. Furthermore, test-taking skills neither develop
nor examine a student's ability to just be a good person who will lead a
meaningful life.
To tie this back to Selwyn's definition of formal and
informal education, it seems that formal education equips its students to hold
generic jobs. It doesn't necessitate critical thinking about morality,
happiness or productivity. Students have a choice between learning to
appreciate facts and learning how to think. Kohn has shown his conviction that
formal education is far more likely to lead to the former than the
latter.
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