What Is Education For? What I Keep Learning as a Teacher and Parent
The question came from a boy in the third row, halfway through a Tuesday lesson on quadratic equations. He wasn’t being difficult. He just looked up from his worksheet and said, “Why do we have to learn this? I’m not going to use it.” The class went quiet. Not the bad quiet—the kind where everyone is waiting to see what I’ll say.
I’d been teaching for about seven years at that point, and I’d heard the question before. Usually I’d say something about problem-solving skills, or mention how architecture and engineering rely on math. But that day, I hesitated. Because the truth was, I didn’t have a clean answer. I knew the quadratic formula wasn’t going to come up in most of their futures. And I was tired of pretending the reason was simply “because it’s on the test.”
So I said, “You’re probably right. You won’t use this exact formula. But right now, you’re learning how to sit with something that feels pointless and confusing and not give up. That’s a real skill, even if it doesn’t look like one.”
He nodded. I’m not sure he was convinced. I’m not sure I was either.
But that moment stuck with me, and it got me thinking about something I still don’t fully understand: what is education for, anyway? Not the official purpose we put in mission statements—preparing students for the future, creating lifelong learners, all that. I mean the actual, everyday point of sending children to school and sitting with them at the kitchen table while they cry over a reading log.
I’ve had more time to think about this since becoming a parent myself. My daughter is in second grade now, and last month she had a homework assignment that asked her to read the same short passage three times and draw what happened. By the second reading, she was slumped over the table, pencil unclenched, eyes fixed on a smudge in the corner of the page. “This is boring,” she said. “Why do I have to do this?”
I opened my mouth to say something about reading skills and school requirements. But I caught myself. I remembered that boy from third period, and how my automatic answer hadn’t actually helped him. So instead I said, “What feels hard about this right now?”
She thought about it. “I already read it. Why do I have to read it again?”
We talked about how reading something more than once can help you notice things you missed the first time. Then I asked her what she thought the dog in the story was feeling when it got lost in the park. She perked up and started talking about how the dog might have been scared, and then we read it a third time just to check if the story said anything about that. She finished the assignment, but more importantly, she had a reason to finish.
That’s the part of education that’s easy to forget. We spend so much time focusing on what children are supposed to learn—dates, formulas, spelling rules—that we ignore the bigger question: why are they learning it in this particular moment? And if there’s no reason, children know. They’re not fooled by phrases like “you’ll need this later.” They know later is a long way off, and they’re stuck in the now.
I’m not saying every lesson has to be fun, or that we have to justify every worksheet until a child is satisfied. That’s not realistic. There will always be tasks that feel like a grind. But I’ve learned that when a child asks why, they’re not always looking for a detailed explanation. Sometimes they just want to know that you see them, that you’re not making them do something arbitrarily, that there’s a person on the other side of the instruction.
A few practical things have helped me in the classroom and at home.
First, I try to be honest about the answer. If the real reason is “this is required by the curriculum,” I say that. I don’t pretend it’s exciting. But then I add what the actual struggle is good for. For example, when teaching long division, I might say, “You won’t do this by hand as an adult, but this is one of the few places in school where you have to follow a long, boring process without skipping steps. That’s worth practicing.” It’s not a perfect pitch, but it’s honest, and kids usually appreciate that.
Second, I’ve stopped trying to make everything relevant. Relevance that feels forced is worse than no relevance at all. Telling a twelve-year-old that a worksheet on comma rules will help them write resumes when they’re twenty-five is laughable. Instead, I try to connect the work to something right in front of them. For a writing assignment, that might mean asking them to write a letter to someone they actually know. For a history lesson, it might mean asking them to compare a past event to something happening in their favorite game or show. The connection doesn’t have to be deep. It just has to make sense for that day.
Third, I’ve realized that sometimes the most educational thing I can do is put the work down and pay attention to the child. When my daughter was struggling with that reading assignment, the problem wasn’t her reading level. It was that she felt stuck and alone in it. The moment I shifted from telling her why to asking her what was hard, the whole tone changed. She went from being a student who was failing at boredom to a person who had a thought about a dog in a story. That’s a small shift, but it matters.
I think that’s what education is for, after all. It’s not about filling children with facts, or even giving them skills they’ll use at a job someday. It’s about helping them realise that they are capable of thinking, that they can ask questions and make sense of confusing things, and that there is a world beyond the worksheet. The content is just the vehicle. The real lesson is in how it feels to wrestle with something hard, and what you do next.
I still don’t have a perfect answer when a student looks at me and asks why they need to learn something. Some days I fumble through, some days I say I don’t know, and some days we just sit with the discomfort together. That’s okay. Every time the question comes up, though, I try to treat it with respect instead of brushing it aside. Because that question is the heart of education. It’s a child asking what the point of all this is, and it deserves an honest, careful response—even if we’re still figuring out the answer ourselves.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Is Education For