Education -- what's the point?

There is an unspoken philosophical debate going on in this country about the purpose of education.  The question is this:  Is the purpose of education to sort out the superior students or is it to teach everyone?

Historically, everyone needed to know enough to read the Bible, write letters, and keep track of their finances.  There was a heavy focus on memorization and handwriting.  Only a very few students went on to higher education.  However, the majority of jobs in the 1800s and earlier did not require any more education than this most basic level.  Education sorted out the few who would continue to college and professions.  Sorting was the goal of the day.  There were wonderful people such as Catherine Beecher and Booker T. Washington, who advocated for further education for women and minorities (believed unlikely to ever need an education), but they were the exception rather than the rule.

Education progressed in many ways, but up through about the 1950s-60s, sorting still remained the primary goal of most public education.  The brightest few were identified early in the schooling process and pushed up through the system to finish high school, and possibly attend college.  Everyone needed the basics, but the bright students definitely received more time and attention.  For the record, most of these favored few were white males.  Black students were separated into inferior schools, although the historically black colleges did serve the brightest from that system.  Girls have a mixed history in school, and I'll leave that for another day.

Obviously, the statements above are huge generalities.  There are, no doubt, hundreds of examples of teachers and schools that did not operate in this manner.  Overall, though, the institution of public education was not terribly concerned with slower or uncooperative students up until this time.

In the 1950s - 60s, major change swept the nation.  Brown vs the Board of Education eliminated segregation, IDEA brought kids with special needs out of institutions and into the classroom, and the feminist movement became active.  The law of the nation stated that every child was entitled to a free and appropriate public education.  These three things were huge in education.  Education was no longer allowed to ignore huge numbers of kids, but the structure of public schools has changed little.

Today, we have No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  The name of this law implies that sorting is out.  Education has still not really caught up.  Even the testing that school success is based on (by the law's standards) is normative, at least here in IL (PSAE for high school, ISAT for lower grades).  This means that scores are compared to other students taking the test on the same day.  The score that the most kids get is the 50th percentile, and is scored accordingly.  There is no objective standard for these tests, which means that by definition, they are competitive exams.  I can rant lots more about that, but I'll save that entire rant for another day.

For now, the question is, as it has been for the last 50 years, what is the purpose of education?  How do we educate everyone without neglecting the top students?  Does sorting have a place in education?  There aren't simple answers to these questions, but until we talk about them, no answers can be found.