Institutions Don't Automatically Have a Purpose

Schools aren't for brainwashing children. They're not for anything.

People I talk to about school in the U.S. usually fall into one of two camps. Most of them say that school, while flawed and maybe even not the right choice for every child, is essential to most because it imparts the core knowledge necessary for adulthood. The others say that school’s societal function is to break our spirits, to condition us to be obedient worker drones who plug into the economy.

To both of these kinds of people I say this: we don’t make kids learn how to do their taxes, and we do force them to film themselves fighting rap battles in a second language.

If school were about giving us the knowledge and skills that most of us will need, tax preparation seems like a no-brainer mandatory inclusion in a high-school curriculum. Sure, it’s a moving target as the tax code evolves, but science lessons also have a limited shelf life and we sure do mandate those. Tax prep is almost tailor-made for teaching in school—you fill out forms in a certain way, do some basic math, and the result can be easily checked for correctness.

If school were about turning us into obedient worker drones, wouldn’t tax preparation be a top priority there too? It’s annoying, unnecessary work that a computer could easily do, and we want everyone to do it anyway, so why not force children to prepare a bunch of sample taxes? I know it breaks my spirit a little every year.

Starting a sentence with “School’s function in society is” gives too much credit to school (and society) no matter how you finish the sentence. Anything that grows and defends itself doesn’t need a purpose in order to exist. Trees have many functions to humans and the ecosystem, but if they weren’t useful to other organisms, trees would still be making more trees. (I could’ve said “weeds” there. I’m being nice. Ish.)

“Doing your taxes” itself is another example of this in the United States. The government, and usually your employers, have enough information to calculate your taxes far more efficiently than having every taxpayer do it individually. In many countries they do it for you. But in the United States, making taxes too easy to do would make some for-profit tax prep companies go out of business, so they lobby to keep them burdensome. Politicians are used to delivering rhetoric about tax day, so they often don’t want to change the rules and have to rewrite their slogans. The current system was created because it made sense at the time, but it doesn’t have to still make sense to continue to exist.

High school has a lot of bark protecting it. Truancy is typically illegal. Prospective employers will worry, with justification, that you didn’t graduate high school because of some personal failing. High school is where everyone your age already is, so not attending it is isolating. Colleges, especially public ones, often require a high school diploma. None of these should be confused with the institution itself having a purpose. They’re just (some of the) reasons why students go to high school, why teachers and others who work in education correctly believe they’re helping students, why high school attendance is positively correlated with outcomes in later life.

Institutions without a purpose can still do a lot of good (and/or harm). They can also, with great difficulty, have purpose temporarily imbued into them using carefully designed ideology, incentives, and process. They can be useful. But the default assumption should be that any robust institution is simply an accident of history.