What Schools Are For: Knowledge, Not Just Skills

I’ve been circling a simple but stubborn question for a while: what does it actually mean to “build knowledge” in a way that leads not just to skills, but to understanding, progress, and truth-seeking? That question took me, somewhat unexpectedly, into the work of the economic historian Joel Mokyr and the intellectual culture of early modern Europe. What I found there is not a theory of schooling in the narrow sense, but a broader claim about how societies learn, argue, and advance, and why schools remain one of the few places where those habits can still be made visible and practiced.

In my essay, I explore Mokyr’s idea of “useful knowledge,” not as a stockpile of facts, but as a social system organized around norms: openness to challenge, respect for evidence, and a shared commitment to the idea that some claims about the world are better than others. My argument is that when education treats knowledge as merely instrumental, something to be measured, credentialed, or “applied”, it risks losing sight of the deeper cultural work schools do in shaping how young people come to care about what is true, and why it matters.

👉 Read the full essay here: The Importance of Useful Knowledge and Truth-Seeking (Fordham Institute)