In my final reflection for the semester of my doctoral studies (don’t ask me how it’s going), I considered what it meant to get an education. Over and again in this space, I’ve considered how there’s a big difference between schooling and education. Schooling is a set of processes characterized by the desire to show students a given set of ideas and materials. Education is the learning that this process is supposed to produce. But, as is the axiom, just because someone is teaching doesn’t mean another person is learning and, what’s more, just because someone is learning doesn’t mean they’re in a place where schooling is happening.

But it also begs the more onerous question: where did education fail us?

As human beings, we’re naturally curious. From birth, we soak in a plethora of sensory information about ourselves, other people, and our surroundings. For many of us, schooling serves as a deterrent to that rendition of education because we’re introduced to what society means by education: a set of explicit and implied knowledges this society wishes to impart through multiple methods to its youngest children. But, if education starts as a process of discovery and curiosity and constricts to an ever-narrowing list of items so the student can participate on multiple levels of society, then what did this schooling do to get this country – and the world – like this?

Specifically, where did education fail us?

Anti-intellectualism may not be enough to fully describe the breadth of our world’s problems. In this country, the line of thinking asks us to believe in systems – public, private, charter, whatever – that ultimately calcify the inequity our country professes to want to eradicate. Too many people take these processes for granted and, rather than fight for better, they push for an individualist narrative, relieving themselves and society from addressing the problem more directly. Schooling serves as a scale for capital, too, where inequity must persist to justify the impulses of parents who wish their child don’t just have better than them, but better than the others as well. Our society couldn’t possibly provide a great education to every child because then some couldn’t bear justifying thousands of dollars for the perceived difference.

So, while I believe in public schools, I also see how society and its actors sow distrust. How can the policymakers and politicians with the pedigrees, titles, and degrees from universities that society lauds also be the very folks who take no responsibility for the inhumane perils we’re witnessing at this moment? How can those same pedigreed people use the knowledge they’ve acquired to destroy whole humans economically, spiritually, and literally?

Which education will give children the idea that we can do better collectively and individually? Which education will help people interrogate the very schooling that either helps or hinders their understanding of this shared humanity? How will adults deliver compassion to students who watched with horror as the country they pledge allegiance to refuses to help their immediate families, friends, neighbors, teachers, grocers, doctors, and other people they loved? How can people with enormous and abnormal riches ever create an equitable society with a general populace who’ve been taught that level of math as truly unquantifiable in their real contexts?

How much schooling does one need to finally receive an education?

We have over 13,000 school districts in the US alone with varying levels of decentralized decisions from curriculum and teacher evaluation to hiring and examination. We have any number of adults who went into the profession either seeking to create change by any means, maintain a job, or everywhere in between. Sociologists would either tell this country that we’re preparing children for the workforce in more ways than one or training them for compliance to society’s norms. We may have a relatively common set of standards, but we still don’t agree on what students should know about the world around them.

And we’re doing this in a country where our understandings of schooling are filtered through the neoliberal, technocratic “No Child Left Behind,” a set of policies that pushed the narrative of higher expectations through more testing and more data. Now, almost two decades after its passage, it’s hard to say if the scaling up of academic achievement led to making a better world from all that schooling.

Either way, we’re getting an education from it. This may not be the narrative you want to hear, but it’s one of the narratives that hopefully inspires us to do better via rage, particularly for those who died for us to learn these lessons.