As we embark on a new school year, should we revisit what education is really for?

My dad was a college dropout. For a while.

He dropped out to go to work. Then he got married. Then he became my father.

He didn't regret the marriage or the children. But he always regretted not completing that college education. And he'd take a class here and there with the goal of finishing a degree — initially in chemistry, the field in which he'd been working since he left school.

Finally he went back in earnest, taking a few courses each semester toward a degree in business. He planned to pursue a second career in accounting when he retired from the chemical company.

He graduated from college the year before I did. Only he graduated summa cum laude.

And he had that second career and excelled in it, working until the day before he died. And through that work, he helped a lot of people.

People who would be much worse off if he hadn't chosen to go back to school.

College isn't for everyone. It really isn't. And there certainly are well-paying jobs that don't require a college degree. We never really wanted for anything before Dad got his.

Specialized training and apprenticeship programs outside a traditional college setting are good things and help fulfill needs both for employers and for the workers themselves.

But that doesn't mean college degrees should be rendered obsolete.

In simple economic terms, studies continue to show that on average, college graduates earn more over their lifetimes than those without degrees. That isn't true across the board, however, and depends on one's field of study and workforce needs.

Reports of decreasing enrollments, higher tuition costs and cuts in programs — at West Virginia University, for example, where I began my academic journey — have a lot of folks wondering whether college degrees are really worth it.

Especially if you can get a good job without one.

But while college might not be for everyone, there are others for whom missing college would be a tragedy. My grandmother was one of them.

She wanted to be a nurse. It hadn't occurred to her family, however, that there was any particular purpose in educating young women. So she became a housewife and a seamstress. An excellent seamstress, by the way, but it's impossible to even contemplate what was lost because she didn't have the chance to follow her dream.

Beyond that point, however, is something that has troubled me for a long time and was recently echoed in an editorial I read about the cuts to the foreign languages department at WVU. And that is how we think about education in general.

If we think about education as nothing more than the acquisition of job skills, we make a grave error. That's almost akin to equating human beings with robots. Education should be about learning — job skills, of course, but also learning about people, culture, society and how we live and interact with each other.

That even applies to vocational education. We've heard over and over from employers about how too many workers know how to do a job, but lack "soft skills" — showing up on time, problem-solving, people skills, dressing professionally, etc.

And let's be honest — if all there is to your life is a job, you're going to have a sad and empty existence. And if you don't nurture skills beyond what's technically required for your work, you might not have the job for long, either.

What I'm suggesting here is two things: First, we need both academic and vocational education opportunities. Colleges and apprenticeships and specialized training. It's not an either/or proposition. And given the speed of technical advancements, continuing education is going to be a fact of life for most of us, anyway.

Second, we need to examine our attitudes toward the "why" of education. It's not just about learning how to do a job. It's about learning how to live.

Some of the responses to the WVU editorial included repetition of an old adage that was flung around even in the dark ages when I was in school — that colleges and universities are left-wing, elitist institutions that indoctrinate students with liberal, socialist philosophies.

I can't say that never happens; maybe somewhere it does. I've only attended three institutions of higher learning — WVU, Marshall University and the Moody Bible Institute. But I can say it never happened in my experience, not at any of them.

I didn't feel indoctrinated even at Moody, where, oddly enough, I was studying doctrine. I learned how to examine scriptures to get at their truth rather than rely on any particular tradition. I participated in serious discussions with classmates and professors during class time, lunch hours and frequently over Chicago deep-dish pizza about what a passage really means, how it should be applied, how to respond to others.

And I learned to examine my own preconceived notions in light of the evidence in front of me, and to be ready to defend my conclusions or change my mind, if warranted.

In fact, in none of those schools was I told what to think. I was taught how to think.

And isn't that the ultimate goal of education?

Tamela Baker is a Herald-Mail feature writer.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Why do we go to school? To learn how to work or how to live?