What Are Schools For?
I ask this almost every day now. Not rhetorically. Genuinely.
We've outsourced information to Google. We've professionalized childcare into standardized curricula. We've reduced learning to testable outcomes. And somewhere in that process, we lost the thing schools were actually for.
But to understand what's lost, you have to go back to what they were built for in the first place.
Formation
The story starts in 1642 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.[1] The Puritans who settled Boston believed that children's salvation, eternal and temporal, depended on their ability to read. Not just to decode words, but to understand Scripture, to know the law, to think for themselves within the framework of their faith community.[2]
So Massachusetts passed the first compulsory education law in North America. It didn't create schools yet. It made parents responsible for teaching children to read. Five years later, in 1647, they went further. Every town had to establish and maintain schools, not because information needed distributing, but because formation couldn't be left to chance.[3] Education was a moral enterprise. A civic one. A spiritual one.
For nearly two hundred years, this was the frame: schools existed to shape character, to transmit values, to create people who could read Scripture and law and think about their place in community. Whether you agreed with the Puritan theology or not, the purpose was clear.
The Shift
Then something changed. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, schools stopped being primarily about who young people became and started being primarily about what they could do.
The Industrial Revolution accelerated this. Factories needed workers, literate workers, but workers nonetheless. By the early 1800s, schools were being designed explicitly to teach discipline, obedience, and rote memorization.[4] In 1805, the New York Public School Society was formed by wealthy businessmen to provide education for poor children, run on the "Lancasterian" model, in which one master could teach hundreds of students in a single room, emphasizing discipline and obedience, qualities that factory owners wanted in their workers.[5]
Schools became less about cultivating wisdom and more about managing populations, preparing them for predetermined roles in an industrial economy.
In 1852, Massachusetts became the first state in the Union to require that children attend school, mandating attendance for children between the ages of 8 and 14 for at least three months a year.[6] By 1918, every state had passed similar legislation.[7]
This wasn't a malicious shift. It was logical. As immigration surged, as cities exploded, as industrial capitalism demanded an educated workforce, schools became the institution where all of this could happen at scale. They became necessary, and in becoming necessary, they became standardized.
But somewhere in that standardization, the soul got lost.
The Depression
If schools had been slowly drifting away from their original purpose, the Great Depression crystallized the new one.
It took the Great Depression to reserve full-time employment for adults.[8] The value of children in the job market plummeted, and they competed with unemployed adults for those jobs for which they remained eligible. In response, many states raised the age of compulsory school attendance from 14 to 16.[9]
What happened next is the key to understanding modern schools. Young people flooded into classrooms, not because of a renewed belief in education as formation, but because they had nowhere else to go. Jobs had disappeared. The only socially acceptable place for a child was school.
Schools responded by lowering expectations. Between 1929 and 1934, enrollment in Detroit's comprehensive high schools jumped by more than 43 percent.[10] School officials lowered standards and weakened the content of the remaining academic courses. Science laboratory courses gave way to large lecture classes in biology, chemistry, and physics.[11]
The message was implicit but clear: school wasn't about becoming educated anymore. It was about being managed, contained, kept from becoming a social problem. The Depression didn't create this system, it perfected it. Schools became warehouses. Efficiency became the goal. Complying with the system, not questioning it, became the hidden curriculum.
Now
Fast forward to today. We inherited that system intact.
Schools no longer exist primarily to form character or cultivate wisdom. They exist to deliver standardized content, sort students into achievement bands, and prepare them (theoretically) for economic participation. Test scores matter more than questions. Coverage matters more than depth. Moving through the curriculum matters more than knowing a student.
The irony is brutal: we kept the form without the substance. We kept compulsory attendance without the moral clarity about why. We standardized the machinery without remembering what it was supposed to produce.
And young people know it. They feel it. School is something that happens to them, not something they're part of creating. The questions don't belong to them. The meaning is pre-assigned. The system asks them to sit still, receive information, and regurgitate it on a test, not because anyone believes this is how learning works, but because this is how the machine operates.
This is why churches are dwindling. This is why public education is struggling. This is why young people are disengaged. Both institutions, religious and educational, once provided what humans actually need: meaning-making communities, places where you could ask hard questions alongside people who cared about the answer, spaces where your becoming mattered more than your compliance.
Both lost sight of that. And both are now scrambling to remember.
What I Know Works
I've spent the last several years building something different. It's small. It's not scalable in the traditional sense. But every time I see it in action, I see what schools were supposed to do.
I see students asking their questions, not mine. I see them wrestling with ideas that matter to them, and discovering that wrestling itself is where the learning lives. I see them forming relationships with adults who know them, who challenge them, who believe them capable of meaning-making.
It's not magical. It's just what happens when you remember that formation matters more than function. When you create space for real questions. When you treat a young person as someone capable of thinking, not just receiving.
This doesn't require new curricula or flashier pedagogy. It requires a fundamental shift in what we believe school is for.
The Question
Not what are they doing. What are they actually for?
If the answer is "to prepare students for economic participation," we're being honest at least, but we're also admitting we've abandoned the whole reason they started existing in the first place.
If the answer is "to give young people the skills to think critically, ask hard questions, form meaningful relationships, and become people of character", then we're naming something real. And we're also admitting that most schools, as currently structured, are failing at this.
The first step is remembering. Remembering that schools were invented because someone believed that how a young person becomes matters. That literacy wasn't just about decoding, it was about freedom. That education was a moral act.
If we can remember that, the rest becomes possible.
If we can't, we're just managing decline.
The Mirror
Here's what I've learned: I create time, space, and opportunity for students to engage in inquiry-led investigation. I ask questions. I hold the tension. I coach them through thinking they don't know they're capable of yet. I believe in their capacity before they do. That's teaching.
And then AI arrived. And suddenly everyone wanted to talk about whether machines could replace teachers. Whether ChatGPT could write essays. Whether students would lose their humanity to algorithms.
But the question AI actually forces us to ask is older and harder: What is school actually for?
Because if school is content delivery, then yes, AI will do it better. The panic makes sense. But if school is something else entirely, if it's about forming people, coaching them into their own thinking, creating spaces where they become themselves, then AI isn't a threat. It's a mirror. A mirror that shows us exactly what we've lost sight of.
For decades, we've been managing decline without noticing it. We've had brilliant coaches forced into lecturing roles. We've had brilliant questioners reduced to test prep. We've built systems that deliver information so efficiently that we forgot information was never the point. AI doesn't cause that problem. It just makes it impossible to ignore.
So maybe the real question isn't whether AI belongs in schools. Maybe it's whether we can finally remember what schools are supposed to be. Whether we have the courage to build them as places where young people learn to think, to question, to become. Not faster. Not more efficiently. But actually.
Or whether we'll just keep doing what we've been doing, only with better technology.
What are schools for? We keep asking the question. But we don't seem to know how to live with the answer.
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