Pointless Discussions

In your view, what’s the primary goal of the education system? What’s the point?

No matter what your answer is, you’re going to have lots of people who disagree with you. Some people might agree that it’s one of the goals, but not the primary. Other people might not agree that it’s a goal at all! They might say it’s a nice secondary effect but not something to specifically strive for, or they might say it should actively be discouraged.

Here’s the core of the problem I’m describing: the education system in America doesn’t have a single, stated primary goal. According to the Department of Education, their goal is to “promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”

But like oh so many mission statements, that one doesn’t mean anything. At best, it’s a vague philosophy, not a goal. “Promote achievement?” Sure, but what are we trying to get them to achieve? Anything? A specific thing? Fostering excellence is meaningless unless you define excellence in the first place. What is excellence? Test scores? Graduation rates? Employment rates as adults?

It’s all too broad. People want too many different things to be able to group them all together and say “we’re going to promote more goodness and less worseness” and have it mean anything.

Why is this important? Because it makes more acute conversations about specific educational policy really, really difficult to have in a productive way.

For example: A given school district has gotten a minor grant for an additional program. Should it allocate that to an arts course or a gifted and talented program? It’s a rhetorical question – I’m sure you have your view on the actual question, but I’m not debating that here. What I’m pointing out is that the question itself can only be answered from the perspective of what you think the ed system’s goals should be.

As a professional coach, one of the central pillars of our profession is that we don’t impose a goal on our clients; we help them refine what their own goals are, and then we help them achieve those goals through better processes and decision-making clarity. So if one of my clients asks me something like “Should I take this new job,” I’m not answering whether I would take that job, or even if I think it’s a good idea overall. What I’m doing is running that question through a fairly simple formula with the client.

First, we go back to their Main Goal. Then, we work through whether or not taking the new job (or whatever decision they’re facing) is likely to move them toward or away from that goal. Since we have a Main Goal, this process is much easier than it would be if we’d never defined a Main Goal to begin with. Without a Main Goal, pretty much every decision has pros and cons – the job has higher salary but is farther away, it has a better manager but worse public visibility, etc. – and we don’t know which factors are more important than others because we don’t have an objective to measure them against.

I started off by talking about the education system because it’s a great example to illustrate this problem, but it’s far from the only example. Any project, organization, or endeavor needs to be aimed at something. The more goals you try to mix together, the worse you are at accomplishing any of them. Likewise, the more people who work on any given enterprise, the harder it will be to keep them aligned and communicating well. So big projects with lots of goals have both of these problems.

In general, try to break your goals down into their smallest cohesive endeavor. And before you try to influence someone on what should be done, make sure you’re in agreement on the baseline goal of what you want accomplished! Otherwise, there’s not much point to the discussion.