BY: YELLOW HEIGHTS
After achieving the American dream, he set out to teach his favorite subject — math. He inspired students to learn, grow, and build confidence in themselves. After two years, he received his only performance review— an ultimatum: change or leave. He shares his story in an upcoming book, part of which is at “Unbalance: An Immigrant Teacher’s Life and Perspective on U.S. Education”: Prologue)
The Purposes of Education
According to education scholar David Labaree, U.S. education has three social purposes: democratic citizenship, social efficiency, and social mobility.
Earlier in U.S. history, public schools have created roughly equal conditions for citizens through education access and a strong culture of civic commitment. The first purpose, democratic citizenship, remains especially important today through civics education and has the potential to unite the nation and combat increasing political polarization.
U.S. education emphasizes civil disobedience to force changes to existing social order, often by intentionally breaking unjust laws. From the nation’s founding to the civil rights movement, fighting against injustice has been regarded as a high civic virtue, even at the risk of breaking existing rules. This is valuable and takes extraordinary courage. However, it should be balanced with the commitment to free speech and the capacity to listen to different opinions without getting confrontational or exclusionary.
The second purpose of education, social efficiency, is to provide the economy with skilled workers. The early 20th century witnessed the rise of the corporate economy, megacities, and immigration waves. Education introduced measures to address this need by providing scientific training, vocational training, and differentiated instructions based on capabilities.
Economic needs for labor evolve over time, and education needs to keep pace. In today’s information age, when access to learning resources is widely available, education should depart from imparting knowledge to teaching students how to think and learn for themselves. The looming AI age challenges education to fulfill the need to provide students with new skills, such as asking the right questions or judging answers from outside sources logically.
The third purpose of education, social mobility, is to prepare students to compete for social positions and realize their individual dreams. Americans have equated opportunity with upward mobility, and social mobility is the very fabric of the American dream. According to 19th-century Harvard president James Bryant Conant, a high degree of social mobility is the essence of a classless society: “Democracy did not require a radical equalization of wealth but a continuous process by which power and privilege may be automatically redistributed at the end of each generation.”
This is meritocracy, which assumes that if opportunities can be awarded based on merit, a fair society can be achieved. However, as opportunities became scarce, competition intensified, and education started to resemble a consumer product in the marketplace. Parents wanted the best for their children’s education and were willing to use their resources to get it for them. This behavior resulted in good educational opportunities going disproportionately to students with more family resources and served to diminish social mobility achieved through education.
Through the power of education, which was increasingly influenced by students’ family backgrounds, economic stratification has become more extreme and rigid in recent decades. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (2021) reported that only 50% of individuals born in the 1980s earned more than their parents, compared to 90% of those born in the 1940s, indicating that the social mobility goal of education has not been achieved.
Partly in response to the failure to achieve social mobility, education has recently embraced a fourth goal: social justice. This goal is prominently featured in today’s teacher education programs and K-12 school missions and is encapsulated in a tenet I learned in education school: “The work to create a more equitable world through education is the highest calling of our time.” From this perspective, education is less about learning than about using its power to allocate social access and opportunities to achieve social justice, a tool to correct the inequalities created by social structure and market forces.
Can education realistically achieve all these goals? In my view, it would be extremely difficult—if not impossible—due to conflicting priorities and structural limitations within the education system, which make it an inadequate tool for such ambitious social missions.
First, some of the goals conflict with each other. While democratic citizenship and social efficiency are public goals, enabling social mobility is a private goal. Parents want the best educational outcome, but only for their own children. A limited supply of great colleges makes K-12 education a zero-sum competition, and those with more resources usually win. There needs to be a balance between the public and private goals of education. Another conflict is between social justice and social efficiency. In education, some practices to maximize social efficiency, such as stratification and tracking based on capabilities, often create disparate educational outcomes and conflict with social justice goals.
Secondly, education alone cannot address the larger forces behind issues like inequity. Pursuing distributional justice must be achieved primarily through the economic and social system that distributes rewards, not the education system that cultivates the skills essential to grow the economic pie. In pursuing ambitious social goals, we are asking education to fix social and political problems that we are unwilling or unable to address through political actions. School is only a part of a student’s education. Parents, community, and other social institutions play even greater roles in addressing student challenges rooted in broader social issues. Over-focusing on social issues can detract education from its more inherent functions of learning.
This results in a loss of excellence and a lack of accountability at all levels. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (commonly known as “The Nation’s Report Card”), basic K-12 academic skills have declined significantly in the past two decades despite increased spending. Its latest report, issued in January 2025, showed that six states—Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington—lost ground in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math despite receiving substantial pandemic stimulus funding.
At the system level, there is little political accountability for the poor student learning outcomes in the U.S. education system. At the school level, student academic achievements are less important than equity goals in determining resource allocation and principals’ career paths. At the teacher level, their careers often have little to no correlation to student learning outcomes, demoralizing those who truly want to help students learn.
It is time to scale back the ambitious social goals of education and let it focus on learning.
About the author: Immigrant. Parent. Math volunteer. Climate science researcher. Software engineer and manager at Microsoft. Investment analyst, trader, and risk manager at a hedge fund. Entrepreneur. A forty-five-year-old new teacher.
