What are schools for anyway?

I really like this opinion piece by Gary Gutting, which points out that first and foremost, the point of college is "to nourish a world of intellectual culture."  The same is true of elementary and secondary schools; the development of skills and accumulation of knowledge are mechanisms that allow students to engage in that world of intellectual culture. They are means to an end, and not an end in-and-of themselves, though too often anxiety about progress trumps attention to development by parents and educators alike. This is especially true when thinking about the arms race that grips high school students attempting to navigate the unbelievably competitive college application process, and the trickle-down impact this has on middle school, elementary school, and even Kindergartens, many of which have become entirely too academic for their students' development.


I also appreciate Gary's perspective on the role of interest and motivation in the classroom:


"Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting.  It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have.   Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting."