On a cynical day, I pick up my Starbucks cup and carefully maneuver the inside cup so I can read the "the way I see it" on the back. It's a well-written piece by a Teacher of the Year who teaches kindergarten. I can't recall it verbatim, but it has to do with children entering a forest and learning to read. At the end, he explains that it's better for children to enter the forest skipping merrily along the path (which is probably why he doesn't teach junior high) than going at it with a machete.
There's an element of truth to the statement. Children need to explore for the sheer excitement of exploring. I think this is especially true of small children who need to be sheltered from the cut throat "real world." Nonetheless, at some point, they need to also learn to pick up the machete and begin tearing down the edifice of ignorance, the presuppositions of authoritarian prejudice and the destructive forces of apathy. At some point, education becomes a tool for warfare rather than a pleasant stroll in the afternoon.
An education is dangerous. Telling children that it's an afternoon stroll is like teaching them to play with fire. True, we need to let them play. But we are kidding ourselves when we deny it's danger. An education can be a means to broadening a worldview, but it can also darken it with heavy handed indoctrination. It can teach valuable skills to help students live, but it can also teach skills to manipulate others. An education can teach a student self-respect, but it can equally replace the self-respect with self-deception, an inflated sense of self-worth and a vanity that leads to death.
I would argue that education is that machete. It's the machete that tore down Jim Crow laws in the south and built apartheid in South Africa. After all, the Dutch intellectuals who created apartheid had the same doctoral degrees as Martin Luther King Jr. It's the machete that tore down the Native American culture, replacing hate with a thin veneer of civilization, all in the name of Manifest Destiny. But it's also the machete of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. It's the scientific machete of Dr. Salk's polio vaccine and of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's the machete of Mein Kompf and of The Cost of Discipleship.
I wonder if students would respond differently to education if they knew that it wasn't a path through a forest, but rather a dangerous tool that can change lives for better or for worse.