The Goal of Higher Education

Click here for an interesting article by Gary Ledbetter – The ‘Imperative’ of Higher Education.

At its core, the article is discussing what should be the core goal of a college education. Should it be to prepare students for a future career? No, according to Ledbetter. Should it be to build character in the students? Again the answer is no. Should it be to help students find an identity? To acquire knowledge? To gain new experiences? No, no, and no.

A college education should train students to think.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote this about higher education. “To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.”

I don’t know if I would discount career training or character building as much as you might sense in Ledbetter’s article. But I agree that highest priority ought to be given to helping students learn to think well. I don’t yet know how good of a job I do of that as an educator. Sometimes that is harder work than just stuffing data into students' heads, hoping they can spit it back out on an exam.

One of my favorite classes at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary was Systematic Theology, taught by Dr. David Kirkpatrick. I remember walking out of that class often pondering to myself, “I don’t know how much I just learned in that class, but I sure had to think a lot.” In fact, several years later, I shared this with Dr. Kirkpatrick. I’m not sure he took it as a compliment, but I meant it as the highest of compliments. I wasn’t aware of how much knowledge I was acquiring (thought it turned out to be quite a lot in that class), but I was well aware that I was thinking hard about difficult topics. It was a GREAT class.

I’d like for students to be able to say the same thing about my classes someday.