(Note: This is a reprint of a post I wrote on last year’s Martin Luther King Day)
Sylvia Martinez has written a post sharing a speech King gave to the United Federation of Teachers, and commenting that she thinks it reflects a perspective that would include critiquing initiatives like the Race To The Top because it is “designed to create winners and losers in an education “game.””
While a college student in 1947, Martin Luther King also wrote a column in the campus newspaper and titled it “The Purpose of Education.” I wonder if this excerpt from King’s column (you can read the complete piece at Stanford’s collection of his papers), might raise similar questions:
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.
The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society….
The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.
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