What is the purpose of education? What is the idea behind university?
Chomsky points out a tension that feels almost too familiar to name. There’s a traditional view: human beings are naturally curious, and education is supposed to be inquiry, discovery, and intellectual self-defense. And then there’s the other model...education as an apparatus for training compliance, sorting people, and keeping the machine running.
But in the words of U2, “her lips say one thing, her movements something else” (Borrowed from the Bible?). What I mean is that no matter what we claim education is...what it is, is what we can observe on the ground.
So the question becomes less poetic and more concrete. Is a university a center for creativity...or is it a commercial enterprise where knowledge is commoditized and credentials are the product? Is it a place where questions like “What will the exam cover?” trump “What can we discover?”
The credential problem (and why it matters)
We live in a world where university versus high school can lead to vastly different lives. Some of that is clearly skill building. But a big part of it is signaling and gatekeeping. Employers often treat the degree itself as evidence that you can finish difficult things, follow through, and operate within institutional expectations...even when the degree content is not directly related to the job.
And this is not just an intuition. A hiring survey experiment with German employers found they were nearly 1.8 times more likely to invite otherwise identical applicants for an interview if they had completed a degree, compared to those who started higher education but did not finish.
So yes, education can be about enlightenment...but it is also a sorting mechanism. And once that is true, “scaling” becomes the obsession.
Scalability turns learning into logistics
If university access must scale, then pacing becomes the invisible dictator.
This takes us to learning objectives and sequencing. In a finance stream, the destination is the destination. We are trying to get students ready for a certain type of competence...and often a certain type of job. So the learning objectives will be broadly stable across cohorts. The question is not the goal. The question is the route.
Right now, the system treats the route like a factory belt. If my course feeds into another course, then I’m no different from a worker on an assembly line. There are dependencies and time constraints. I must produce a standardized output at a standardized time...or the belt jams.
But learning does not actually work like that.
Bloom’s mastery learning framing was blunt about the variable we pretend does not exist: different learners often need different amounts of time to reach mastery, and one of the key levers is the mismatch between time required and time allowed.
This is where the GPS analogy matters. The destination stays the same. But when a road is blocked, the GPS reroutes. It does not scream “FAILURE” because you didn’t arrive in the exact same number of minutes as the person in the car next to you. Education, sadly, refuses that flexibility. It keeps everyone on one route...and then punishes people whose brains needed a detour.
The motivation trap: carrots, sticks, and the slow death of curiosity
And because the system refuses to treat learners like humans with different pacing needs, it leans on behavioral management: “positive reinforcement” and “consequences” (euphemisms for carrot and stick). Grades. Awards. Honors. Ranking. Praise as control. Fear dressed up as “standards.”
There’s strong evidence that this backfires. A large meta-analysis (128 studies) found that many kinds of expected, tangible rewards significantly undermine intrinsic motivation, especially when rewards are tied to doing, completing, or performing a task.
And for a lay example that matters: Butler and Nisan’s classic work showed that when students received task-focused comments, their interest held up better than when they received grades (or no feedback). In other words...feedback that helps you improve can support motivation, while evaluation that controls you can shrink it.
So when we say “students are unmotivated,” we should sometimes translate that into: “students have learned that school is not about learning.”
Competition and grading: Alfie Kohn’s warning label
Alfie Kohn has been arguing for decades that competition is often sold as “motivating” when it is actually corrosive. His critique is not sentimental. It is built on a research tradition comparing competitive versus cooperative conditions, and a major review of that work notes a consistent pattern: competition typically leads to less creativity, poorer performance, and reduced satisfaction.
Now zoom out. If the classroom is a competitive arena and grades are the scoreboard, then a student’s relationship with learning becomes transactional. And transactional motivation is fragile. It works until it doesn’t...and then we blame the child.
Rubrics: transparency, or a creativity tax?
Rubrics are supposed to help. They make expectations visible. They can reduce arbitrariness. They can improve fairness.
But rubric-based grading can also produce a very specific kind of damage: students stop exploring and start optimizing. They don’t ask “what is interesting?” They ask “what gets the points?”
There’s a painfully revealing anecdote in a paper on rubrics and creativity: a child rejects suggestions for improving a project with, “No, that’s not on the rubric...this is all we’re supposed to do.” The authors take this as a snapshot of how rubrics can be experienced as restrictions rather than guidance.
And this is not just about one kid being literal. A research-informed review on rubrics notes that overly exact rubrics can “reduce learner creativity.”
This is the “average performance” problem. When students are handed a detailed analytic rubric, many will reverse engineer it. They will aim for the safest version of success...and safe success tends to look like sameness. Creativity becomes an avoidable risk, because the rubric rewards compliance with predefined boxes.
Ken Robinson’s core point lands here: if the system trains people to fear being wrong, originality becomes psychologically expensive.
If we insist on rubrics, then we should at least stop using them like cages. There is a growing push for process-based rubrics that assess thinking, iteration, risk-taking, and reflection...not just polish.
Tech and “modernization”
The tech conversation is often framed as inevitability. But the evidence is more sobering than the marketing.
OECD PISA 2022 data reports that students who say they are distracted by other students using digital devices in math lessons score 15 points lower, even after accounting for socio-economic profile.
And even when the device is used “just for notes,” there are tradeoffs. A well-known study found students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than those who took notes by hand, partly because laptop notes tend to become verbatim transcription rather than processing.
Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath’s recent work is part of this broader critique of classroom tech being treated as automatic progress.
So...what is education for?
If the purpose of education is human development, then the current model is often failing its own mission. It standardizes what should be personal. It times what should be flexible. It motivates with control, then acts surprised when curiosity dies. It claims creativity matters, then grades students into conformity.
And yes...this is a systems problem. But it also starts at home. Parents and educators can choose to prioritize emotional wellness over prestige. Meaning over medals. Growth over rankings. Real learning over performative achievement.
Hope is not a vibe. Hope is a redesign.