As summer winds down and the new school year begins, students are preparing to return to the classroom with new backpacks and, hopefully, renewed vigor for the task of learning.

While formal schooling took a pause for most students these past few months, the battles over where, how, and what they will learn in the coming year and years did not. This summer saw a continuation of the education wars that have erupted across the country. In Florida , the state's remake of New College continued apace, as did battles over reforming state curriculum. Elsewhere, in Ohio, the state’s new two-year budget expanded tuition support for families wishing to send their children to private, including religious, schools, though not without vigorous opposition.

We must not mistake the battles going on as mere partisan posturing in search of donations and votes. How we view education’s purpose says much about how we understand ourselves, both as human beings and as Americans.

Our approach to education says much about how we view human nature as well as the very meaning of life. Regarding nature, do we believe that humans possess a fundamental freedom of mind or no? If humans are free in their minds, then education should seek to enhance the exercise of that freedom. That kind of learning involves not demanding certain views from students but instead equipping them to think well. It means teaching deep reading, critical thinking, and the capacity for independence bred not of ignorance but of careful consideration of thoughtful but conflicting claims.

However, if we think the human mind is not free, then we are mere captives to our time, to our prejudices, and thus to other controlling factors. In that view, our education will take the form of an imposed, ordered system of thought to direct those who can’t think for themselves. It involves browbeating any opposition as evil, bigoted, or stupid. It necessitates only exposing contrary views for the purpose of ridicule.

We should not underestimate the political importance of this approach, regardless of the particular subject matter taught. Our republic operates from the premise of human equality. That equality is not based in common human slavery but in shared human liberty. It demands self-governance from both the rulers and the ruled — a demand that establishes a high expectation for human beings to rule themselves well, according to justice. That demand also requires minds free enough to see the good and be able to choose it for themselves and act for the sake of others.

These views of human nature, then, have import for how education understands human purpose. We hear often that we educate so young people can obtain gainful employment. Doing so benefits them with a comfortable lifestyle and society by increasing economic production and decreasing dependency on social services.

Nothing in those claims is inherently wrong. But we mistake human beings and their educational needs if we reduce all learning goals to gaining and keeping a job. Humans are more than their economic output, the size of their house, or the gains of their stock portfolio. Humans live for relationships with each other in marriages, families, friendships, and more. They live to pursue good, including seeking justice for others and virtue for themselves. Most of all, they seek a right relationship with their creator, one that combines relational love and pursuit of good.

Education must seek to cultivate these needs as well. Teachers must be in the business of instructing in virtue, in beauty, in truth. Moreover, they must seek to prepare students to live out their humanity in a particular time and place, in a political community. The ancient philosopher Aristotle said all humans are by nature political animals because we possess the capacity to rationally speak to each other and to form communities around that speech. We must know ourselves as Americans, know our principles and history, to fulfill that ancient truth.

As students return, the education battles will continue. Let us strive to teach and to engage for the right reasons. Our answers on these fronts say much about who we are. And they will say much about who we will be.

Adam Carrington is an assistant professor of politics at Hillsdale College.