Two Visions for Education

Here are a couple (albeit similar!) visions for education by two great modern thinkers.

From The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together As Things Fall Apart by Astra Taylor

What we need, instead, is a system of education that is public, universal, reparative, and free. By public I mean funded by public dollars, not by tuition or by debt. By universal, I mean a space for everyone at every stage of life, where all subjects can be explored. By reparative, I mean an education system designed to acknowledge and actively redress past and ongoing social inequalities. By free, I mean in both price and purpose: education must be free in cost and aimed at freedom by unbinding curiosity. Should these conditions be met, education could actually be the motor of equality, opportunity, and learning so many of us want it to be. If we dedicate more public resources to cultivating curiosity, we can all be more secure.

- Astra Taylor

From from Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class by Sarah Smarsh

To clear that toxic stream [of the current political crisis], we need robustly funded schools with civics curricula that activate participation in democracy, tell the story of all peoples, admit our often brutal history as a nation, and incorporate twenty-first-century media literacy as an essential tool of citizenship. We need government crackdowns on big tech's complicity in the spread of misinformation.

- Sarah Smarsh