Understanding education is key to understanding the story of our species. Like many of our animal cousins, we supplement the gifts received through genes with gifts passed on by our culture; we just do it a lot better. Education is the craft of weaving the biological with the social. We take the genetically determined ability to have a language and graft onto it the ability to write and read. We thank the genetic accident that lets us distinguish pitch and perceive rhythm, and turn into music. How do you make so much more out of what is given to us? The magical practice is called education. Culture is like the third spiral of DNA - it is closely bound with the two original ones, to the point that it is actually quite difficult to tell the boundaries between the genetic information and that transmitted through culture.
Tolkien’s mythology describes “the strange gift of mortality bestowed upon Men by Ilúvatar,” but not other intelligent species like elves and dwarfs. It is indeed strange to think of mortality as a gift rather than a curse, but it is definitely one of the most profound human conditions. The biological evolution has learned to pass a lot through the death barriers by reproducing biological copies. Because of sexual reproduction and random mutations, the copies are not exact, and sometimes are better-fitting than the originals. However, the third spiral of DNA can only be reproduced artificially, and with much higher chance of positive mutation. Education is thus the cultural enzyme that tells us which raw elements of chaotic human culture are to be expressed in every new generation, and which are to be suppressed. Hence, in school we study math rather than murder.
The fundamental human process is self-domestication, self-improvement as a species. Our long journey to freedom from violence and suffering is very slow and painful. However, in evolutionary terms, it is a wild success in a blink of an eye. How do you get from the total warfare and hunger to a relatively peaceful and prosperous world of 10 billion people in mere few thousand years, and without any noticeable edits in the genetic pool? How do we record more knowledge that anyone of us is capable of knowing? The answer to those questions is in our secret evolutionary weapon, education.
In any given society, there exists a set of practices based on selection of knowledge. They select certain kind of knowledge and deem it worthy to be curriculum. They also select certain social mechanisms to ensure that youngsters learn. The combination of the two creates a steady push for the human species to drift in a particular direction. Education provides directionality of human history as history of humans. Some believe it is the explicitly stated ideals, or the Universal Spirit, or the objective material forces, or god that provide the arch to human history. However, from the evolutionary point of view, the most powerful force is the slow wind that fills the sails of educational practices. It affects how the new generation will be a little bit different from the previous, intentionally so. Imagine a huge airship, the society, at the bottom of which is a small engine, education. The airship is at the mercy of huge economic and technological winds, however, the tiny engine pushes it in one direction; over decades, it wins.
Of course, kids will learn what they learn, with or without intentional education. A.V.Mudrik defined education as a relatively more manageable part of socialization. Yet again, even if the unmanageable part of socialization is bigger and stronger, the gentle boost provided by education is directional, not random. Education is nothing if not selection. A society has to decide which things are worth learning - both in content and in content and in social arrangements of educational institutions.
Do you want to know what a society wants in terms of redesigning human beings? - not what it says it wants, but what it actually wants?, - take a look at its educational system. For example California says it wants to prepare its workforce for 21 century jobs, especially in STEM. Yet it spends about average on K-12 schools, underpays its teachers, and tolerates significant shortages of STEM teachers for many years. It says it wants to educate in inclusive environments, and yet it tolerates both huge shortages of special education teachers, and many segregated classrooms. What it really wants is tax rates competitive for its businesses and population; and it wants them more than STEM workforce and inclusion. You can talk all about equality of opportunities, but be unwilling to provide quality schooling for all kids. You can talk about access to higher education, but unwilling to pay for mass university systems. I say unwilling, not unable, although in this context they are the same thing. To the extent we can assume there is a directionality of human history, the direction is the intent.
One can look at number of other policies: economic, social, healthcare, etc. to guess the direction. However, only education will tell you the prevailing anthropological project, the project of changing the human being.
Of course, the developmental direction of the California society is not created in one person’s head; it is a result of complex political dynamics. Indeed, there are significant policy efforts to reshape education in California to provide for equity, inclusion, STEM careers, and access to college. Within education, there are also competing interests and conflicting intentions. However, the point remains: if you want to know where a society is heading, take a look at its education, as it actually works, not how it is meant to work.
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