The Fundamental Question in Education

What is the most fundamental question in education?

Before I offer my answer, you’ll need to understand how I got to the question.

Browsing books that are old friends is one pleasure of being unplugged from the Internet for a sustained time, as I was recently. During this travel to time past, I re-read several essays by Stephen Jay Gould in his book Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. Gould’s book is a perfect choice for moments when solitude are few and unpredictable. The essays are short, crisp, deftly written pieces that provide surprising twists. And it’s fun to see someone play with ideas.

I gravitated to the section of essays Gould called “Patterns and Punctuations in the History of Life.” While there are many compelling reasons not to overextend the analogy of biological evolution to educational change, it is still illustrative to explore periods of rapid and seemingly discontinuous change whenever and wherever they occur.

Gould discusses two such periods, one in the early Cambrian when the diversity of life exploded and a second in the Permian when the reverse occurred. Both events have provided paleontologists and evolutionary biologists much grist for scientific conjecture. I won’t summarize those explanations here; Gould wrote in the 1970s and I have no knowledge of whether his interpretations would still be consistent with the evidence. But if you like to see someone grapple with important questions, then you could do no better than to read Gould’s treatment of these discontinuities.

One item, however, that transcends time is when Gould describes ecology as “focus[ing] on the interactions of organisms and their environments to address what may be the most fundamental question in evolutionary biology: ‘Why are there so many kinds of living things?’”

This stopped me short as I translated it into my own work. What is the most fundamental question in education?

Unfortunately this is not unambiguous. What does “in education” mean? If it means learning, then because learning has a biological substrate there may be a counterpart to the central question in ecology. Identifying this question is better left to learning theorists, but I suspect it would be something along the lines of “How do people learn?”

But let’s leave aside the biological link to education and concentrate rather on the historical, social, institutional, and cultural. Certainly there are fundamental questions in other disciplines similar to education. For example, Eric Beinhocker says “there are two fundamental questions that economists have grappled with throughout the history of their field: how wealth is created and how wealth is allocated.” (The Origin of Wealth, page 25).

What then is the fundamental question for education? I’ll propose one just for the sake of stirring the pot to see what percolates up. It’s based on the observation of Walter Ruegg that the “the university is the only European institution to have preserved its fundamental patterns and basic social role and functions over the last millennium.” (Universities in the Middle Ages, page ii).

My question: “What is it that makes education impervious to kernel change?”

What do you think? Are there alternative questions that are more fundamental? Or is this just a bogus exercise?