Education: What is its purpose?

What is the purpose of education? If you were to ask a small group of teachers, administrators, students, parents, etc to address this question, how difficult it would be to reach a consensus?

• No matter what ever global problem you are dreading, the solutions always include education, never is it without an education component and sometimes cannot be done without education.
• Education is to teach creative and analytical thinking. To spark curiosity, imagination, and love of lifetime learning. Education is a lifetime journey, not a destination or a transaction.
• The purpose of education is prepare our children for higher education, teach them to navigate social interactions with peers from different backgrounds, and to help them become tax paying members of society. 
• Should young people become educated to get prepared to enter the workforce, or should the purpose of education be focused more on social, academic, cultural and intellectual development so that students can grow up to be engaged citizens? Education should prepare young people for life, work and citizenship.
• No matter what progress is made to shift the practices and content of daily classroom instruction, inequity will continue to be a substantial limiting factor. Real sustainable improvement depends on addressing inequity in areas such as well-paid employment, health care, food, and housing security. You can’t have one without the others.
• In the US, historically, the purpose of education has evolved according to the needs of society. Education's primary purpose has ranged from instructing youth in religious doctrine, to preparing them to live in a democracy, to assimilating immigrants into mainstream society, to preparing workers for the workplace.
• And now, as educators prepare young people for their futures in a world that is rapidly changing, to create adults who can compete in a global economy? To create lifelong learners? To create emotionally healthy adults who can engage in meaningful relationships?
• Most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of them think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. 
• Some others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end.
• Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life.
• School education should prepare students for life - for college, for work, for living within a family and within a community, and for participating effectively in the democratic process.
• Schools have always been about developing students for life and work. And life is much more than earning a living; it is also living a life.
• A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.
• The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.
• Intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character -- that is the goal of true education. 
• If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts.

Education is really aimed at helping students get to the point 

where they can learn on their own ... Noam Chomsky.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know ... Albert Einstein

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people ... Newton

My View:
Education does not have a single purpose; it serves multiple objectives, and the relative importance of each of these objectives can be very personal. Education is to support children in developing the skills, the knowledge, and the dispositions that will allow them to be responsible, contributing members of their community. To be a good friend, to be a good mate, to be able to work, and to contribute to the well-being of the community. Children should learn civic knowledge and master civic skills, respecting others, working collaboratively, acting in a way that is fair and just, and being an active participant in the life of the community. Greed of money and power, if not desisted, destroys an educated person to a great extent. Today, the world is suffering due to the greed of educated and superiority complex of unworthy.