Education is the institution through which skills, knowledge, cultural norms and mores, and the basic facts that are important in society are transmitted to individual members. Education is quite broad, and there are many ways to become educated.
Education happens all of the time and in many different ways—it’s multifaceted and ongoing throughout the lifecourse. In high income countries, schooling is perhaps the most important form of education, schooling referring to the institutionalized system of formal educational instruction.
The U.S. has a fairly good school system, relative to some other countries. Some benefits of the American school system include:
This is not the case all over the world. Poorer nations do not have as formal schooling systems that are as structured as the U.S., and they're not equipped with mandatory education requirements.
IN CONTEXT
Economic development and education go hand in hand--economic development produces the leisure time to engage in protracted, or extended, and sustained schooling. Leisure time enables children to not have to work or contribute to the family, but instead allows them to essentially spend 18 years of their lives not doing anything besides going to school. That schooling, in turn, begets more productivity and more economic development.
It is tough for poor countries to start this cycle if they're so poor that children have to work and contribute to the family rather than have the leisure time necessary to go to school and become innovators and productive members of the economy.
In addition to mandatory education laws, another benefit of American education and American educational institutions is equal opportunity, which is one of the hallmark American values. Everyone should be able to get an education, regardless of race, ethnicity, class, or gender.
IN CONTEXT
You could argue, however, that perhaps the American education system is not as ‘equal opportunity’ as people would like. You could say that equal opportunity does not apply to college, although some are pushing for equal opportunity in college. Not everyone can afford to go to college, because it is very expensive. It continues to get more expensive as individual states are cutting funding for college, whereas they used to pay more than half of the cost of a student to go to college. College, for some poor people, is prohibitively expensive, such that they cannot attend.
If you need a certain amount of money in order to go to college, then how can you say that everyone has the equal opportunity to go to college, if some people are excluded by virtue of money? Certainly, they can take out student loans, but in society today, there is a problem of student loan debt--a student loan debt bubble in the making. Students owe upwards of $100,000, in some cases, in student loan debt, yet they're having difficulty finding jobs. Therefore, it's a problem, and you could say that perhaps the American college system isn't founded on equal opportunity.
Source: This work is adapted from Sophia author Zach Lamb.