For just over sixteen years, I’ve lived in two worlds: one in which education policy is debated and overseen as a school board trustee, and this upcoming semester, I will enter my 8th year as a professor in my local community college classroom. From this vantage point, I see the outcomes of the decisions I made in my TK-8 trustee role for these students. To understand what lies at the heart of education, it helps to look back at the thinkers who shaped American schooling. John Dewey believed public education was the engine of democracy. W.E.B. Du Bois saw education as a form of intellectual liberation, while Booker T. Washington advocated industrial education. Meanwhile, Carter G. Woodson warned us about the dangers of mis-education, an education that teaches people to function within systems without knowing the history that brought those systems into being.
I teach business at my local community college, and every semester, I meet students who remind me why those ideas still matter. Many arrive in my classrooms carrying tremendous resilience and some immense doubt. Some are first-generation. Others are balancing jobs, family responsibilities, and financial pressure. But beneath all of that is a quiet question students, especially students of color, are asking: “Do I belong here, and what’s the role of this institution?”
What strikes me most is that students at this level are already reflecting on their educational journeys and quietly asking whether higher education was truly designed for someone like them. Sitting in both seats, as a school board trustee and community college professor, has taught me that concerns about test scores, achievement, emotional intelligence, attrition, and closing equity gaps are both vital and necessary. Yet the longer I do this work, the more I wrestle with a deeper question: if education is reduced solely to metrics and outcomes, are we missing its higher purpose? Surely education must be about more than performance indicators and career readiness. Education, specifically higher education, must also help students discover agency, a sense of belonging, and the intellectual freedom to imagine lives beyond the limitations imposed on them.
I believe that the purpose of education is liberation. Not ideological liberation but intellectual agency and personal transformation. The great James Baldwin understood that education’s power is its transformative nature when he wrote: “The paradox of education is precisely this that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which one is being educated.”
I teach Introduction to Business, and we were discussing how management should treat employees. I don’t recall what sparked the change in the direction of my lecture, but one student asked a key question of how a country that promotes freedom can, at the same time, enslave an entire population of people, and then, years later, hold them accountable for lack of achievement while holding back quality education and access. I could see the wheels turning in this student's head as she wrestled with the economic concept of capitalism and drew a connection between under-education and the construction of a permanent underclass.
When students, especially community college students of color, begin asking deeper questions about the world and their place in it, education is doing its real work. For those of us who teach, that realization changes everything. bell hooks understood this deeply when in Teaching to Transgress, she wrote: “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” As educators, we are not simply delivering content. We are creating spaces where students discover their agency.
Higher education sits at a crossroads. The old models are cracking, and students are asking institutions to become more responsive to the complexity of their lives. Education has often been one of those vehicles for Black Americans, Latino communities, immigrants, Indigenous students, and countless others historically pushed to the margins. Education has represented more than economic mobility. It has represented visibility, a space for voice and self-definition.
While the country celebrates its independence, here is another opportunity for college campuses and vocational education systems to question our responsibility. I believe that classrooms should no longer solely prepare students to participate in the world as it is. In the age of AI and other emerging technologies, educators must prepare students to think in ways that help them understand the content while also questioning the systems and architectures they encounter. If higher education is to remain relevant in this century, it must do more than prepare students for employment. It must prepare them to think, act, and recognize their own power for intellectual liberation in a rapidly changing world.
