An possibility of exploring the aim of education

This initially serves as a comment to Julia's post, but I now think it may provok more thinking if I post it here.

Actually, I very much agree Dewey’s opinion that education should open doors or enable our students to develop connections. Then the problem is open doors to where? be connected to what? The answer differs individually. A burglar may think that his education should open a door for him to become a more skillful burglar; A young child who is interested in mathematics would believe that his education should connect him to a world full of mathematics; and a person who pursues monetary wealth believe that his education should connect him to a more wealthy status.
Although Dewey insisted that to ask “growth towards what?” is inconsistent with the concept of growth, actually, from my perspective and most of you may also agree, Dewey believed that growth should towards an ideal democratic society. So if an experience couldn’t lead a person towards a good citizen of a democratic society, then this experience is not educative.

Thus we see that Dewey’s growth actually has a direction. If we do not agree with Dewey’s direction, then we should face the questions: what is the right direction of education? Just as I mentioned, the answer may differ from person to person. Then this may lead to a concept of education that students should be taught individually, according individual interests and characters. This concept is at best impracticable and biased. The reason why we are leading to this situation is that we neglect that each individual might have more than one aims and expectation of their education. If everyone is connected only to one place, we would not have a community or a society. There are multiple connections. So there may not be an ultimate aim of education, rather there might be multiple aims of education. Thus we could explore the possibility of defining the aim of education from both the angle of individual and the angle of the whole society, and they try to find the connections between the two types of aims.