What is the purpose of education?

An extract from ‘Intent Implementation Impact: How to Design and Deliver an Ambitious School Curriculum’ by Matt Bromley

An important step in the process of curriculum design is to articulate the purpose of education in our schools and colleges as well as in each of the subject disciplines we teach within these institutions.

You may find the following questions useful when debating the purpose of education in your school or college:

• Why do we exist as a school or college?
• What makes us different?
• What are the opportunities and challenges our learners face because of their geographic/demographic/socio-economic context?
• How does our school or college reflect the local community and jobs market we serve?
• What is our specialism or focus? Why? Will this change?
• How does our community inform what we do and how do we involve that community in designing and delivering our curriculum?
• What is it we intend to teach our learners?
• What do we expect them to know and be able to do by the time they leave?
• Why do we teach each of the subject disciplines and vocations we teach?
• Why do we teach this particular qualification at this particular level?
• Why do we teach this particular module or topic?
• Why do we teach this content at this point?
• Why do we teach this before we teach that?

I cannot answer these questions for you because every school and college are different. I would therefore advise you hold discussions with all your stakeholders. To help provoke and inform these discussions, however, I would like to use this chapter to explore a bigger question: What is the purpose of education at all?

Is the purpose of education to prepare young people for the world of work or is it to instil in them an appreciation of the arts and sciences? Is it to develop character traits – such as resilience and empathy – to increase a learner’s employability, or is it to indoctrinate young people into our shared culture and history?

Is education a means to an end, or learning for learning’s sake?

Thomas Gradgrind, the headmaster in Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times, famously said: “Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

Like Gradgrind, I believe that teaching facts is important, but I don’t believe we should teach “nothing but facts” because facts learned in isolation are of limited value. Rather, we should teach facts and then teach our learners how to apply those facts in a range of different contexts and make myriad connections between them.

Teaching learners how to convey their learning from one context to another is the difference between educating someone and simply training them to perform a task repeatedly. It is, if you like, the difference between learning and performance. I’d go even further in my definition of education…

Whilst I believe that education is about teaching facts and teaching learners how to apply those facts in a range of different contexts, as well as making connections between them, I also think that education is about creating new connections. In other words, education is not just about passing on existing knowledge, but it is also about creating new knowledge and forging new understandings. Plutarch (or was it Socrates or WB Yeats, there’s some confusion over attribution) put it best when he said that education was not about the filling of a pail but about the lighting of a fire.

According to Gert Biesta in his book The Beautiful Risk of Education (2015), there are at least three domains in which education can function and thus three domains in which educational purposes can be articulated. One is the domain of qualification, which has to do with the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values and dispositions. The second is the domain of socialisation, which has to do with the ways in which, through education, we have become part of existing traditions and ways of doing and being. The third is the domain of subjectification, which has to do with the interest of education in the subjectivity or “subject-ness” of those we educate. It has to do with emancipation and freedom and with the responsibility that comes with freedom.

Education, so argues Biesta, is not just about the reproduction of what we already know or of what already exists but is genuinely interested in the ways in which new beginnings and new beginners can come into the world not just how we can get the world into our learners. And this is the crucial point: if we view education – as opposed to training – as a way of creating new knowledge not just of ‘passing on’ existing knowledge, and as a means of developing people who will in turn create new things, then we must encourage risk-taking and experimentation in lessons. Education cannot conform, it cannot inflexibly follow a prescription if it is to focus on how we help our learners to engage with, and thus come into, the world.

Aristotle said we should never think of education solely as a process of production. He made the distinction between two modes of acting: poiesis and praxis, or making action and doing action. Poiesis is about the production or fabrication of things, it is about “how something may come into being which is capable of either being or not being” and about things “whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made”. Poiesis is about the creation of something that did not exist before. Praxis is the domain of the variable – the world of human action and interaction.

While education is clearly located in the domain of the variable, it is concerned with the interaction between human beings not the interaction between human beings and the material world. Education is precisely what production (or poiesis) is not because we teachers cannot claim to ‘produce’ learners. We educate them. We help them to change, to become something new and different. What’s more, we help them to see and interact with the world in new and different ways.

Sharon Todd – in her book Learning from the Other (2003) – argues that teaching only has meaning if it carries with it a notion of ‘transcendence’, that is to say, if it is understood as something that comes from the outside and adds to rather than just confirms what is already there – in other words, education must create new knowledge and understandings not simply ‘pass on’ existing knowledge. Todd quotes Levinas who makes the claim that “teaching is not reducible to maieutics [the Socratic mode of enquiry, but] comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain”.

In other words, in the act of teaching – through education – we achieve far more than simply ‘passing it on’; we create new meanings and new understandings. And often this creation is the result of the interaction itself, it is the very process of teaching that leads to new beginnings being forged. In other words, teaching is essential rather than accidental to learning. Indeed, as Kierkegaard (1985) argues, teaching is about more than simply presenting learners with something they do not yet know, rather it is about presenting learners with something that “is neither derivable from nor validated by what [they] already know” but truly transcends what they already know.

Todd and Kierkegaard both argue that teaching must have meaning beyond the facilitation of learning. In other words, teaching must have a meaning that comes from the outside and brings something radically new as in Climacus’s idea of teaching as “double truth giving” and Levinas’s understanding of teaching as a relationship in which I receive from the other “beyond the capacity of the I” – to emancipate learners. Indeed, the idea that the purpose of education is to emancipate learners – to free them as individuals – played an important role in the establishment of education as an academic discipline.

Emancipation means to “give away ownership” (ex: away; municipium: ownership). Immanuel Kant defined enlightenment as “man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage” and argued that the “propensity and vocation to free thinking” was not a contingent, historical possibility but should be seen as something that was an inherent part of human nature; it was man’s “ultimate destination” and the “aim of his existence”. To block one’s progress towards enlightenment was therefore “a crime against human nature” and a human being could only become human through education.

From this, we can trace the idea that education is not about the insertion of the individual into the existing order but is, instead, about developing autonomy and freedom.

Education, I suggested, is not a process of transportation of information from one mind to another – simply dumping knowledge from teacher to learner – but is a process of meaning and interpretation that involves discussion and debate and the creation of new knowledge and understandings. And it is surely logical to argue that existing knowledge should be discussed and interpreted not simply imparted from one mind to another because, as John Dewey wrote (in his book Experience and Nature, 1929), “consciousness, thinking, subjectivity, meaning, intelligence, language, rationality, logic, inference and truth only come into existence through and as a result of communication”.

Moreover, “when communication occurs… all natural events are subject to reconsideration and revision; they are re-adapted to meet the requirements of conversation, whether it be public discourse or that preliminary discourse termed thinking.”

Dewey seems to agree that education is a social art – more than mere production or reproduction. In Democracy and Education (1916), he said that in education “a being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the activities of others into account [because] they are indispensable conditions of the realisation of his tendencies”. Communication, he argued, should be understood as “a process of sharing experience until it becomes a common possession”. In other words, education is the “participation in a common understanding”.

In short, education is about a warm human interaction. It is about a connection between a teacher and a learner, and between a learner and their peers. It is indeed about learning the best that has been thought and said – Gradgrind’s “nothing but facts” – and then learning how to apply those facts in a range of different contexts and making connections between them. But it is also about the domain of the variable, concerned with the interaction between human beings. It is about helping learners to change, to become something new and different and to see and interact with the world in new and different ways. It is something that comes from the outside and adds to rather than just confirms what is already there; it comes from the exterior and brings more than it contains.

It is along these lines that Dewey suggested a crucial difference between education and training. Training, he said, is about the situations in which those who learn do not really share in the use to which their actions are put; they are not a partner in a shared activity. Education, on the other hand, is about those situations in which teachers and learners share or participate in a common activity, in which they have a shared interest in its accomplishment. In those situations, participants’ ideas and emotions are changed as a result of their very participation: a learner “not merely acts in a way agreeing with the action of others, but, in so acting, the same ideas and emotions are aroused in [the learner] that animate others”. It is not therefore transmitted from one person to another. It is because people share in a common activity that their ideas and emotions are transformed as a direct result of the activity itself. In Democracy and Education, Dewey says that to have the same ideas about things that others have is “to attach the same meanings to things” – something that is brought about through communication and conjoint action.

Here’s the crux of the argument: Dewey rejects the idea that a learner can simply discover the meaning of the world through careful observation from the outside – or by being taught “the best which has been thought and said”. Instead, Dewey suggests that learners learn from the practices in which they take part, they learn by participating in a shared experience. In other words, it is only through the act of learning and engaging in classroom activity that they discover the meaning of the world; meaning cannot be derived without this interaction.

Dewey also makes the point that participation has the potential to generate a particular kind of learning – namely, learning that leads to a transformation of ideas, emotions, and understanding of all who take part in an activity in such a way that a common or shared outlook emerges.

Dewey is not alone – Ernst Von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky all emphasise the importance of learner activity and their theories of the constructivist classroom assume that learners must construct their own insights, understandings and knowledge, and that teachers cannot do this for them.

Let’s bring this discussion back to the curriculum…

Biesta (2015) argues that the purpose of education is to “recognise [each learner’s] unique characteristics and potentials, and [to develop] their ability to act autonomously and independently” Education, Biesta argues, is also a means of socialising “learners into ways of thinking and acting, vis-a-vis educational disciplines [and of teaching] subject-specific bodies of knowledge, skills and values which will qualify students to take on active roles in society”.

Macintyre (2002), meanwhile, believes the purpose of education is to create “an educated public” which is “constituted by educated generalists, people who can situate themselves in relation to society and to nature, because they know enough astronomy, enough geology, enough history, enough economics, and enough philosophy and theology to do so.”

If the purpose of education is to ‘pass on’ the “best that has been thought and said”, who decides what constitutes the ‘best’?

Michael Young (2014) talks of ‘powerful knowledge’ as a type of knowledge that “allows those with access to it to question it and the authority on which it is based and gain the sense of freedom and excitement that it can offer”. Young argues that facts alone do not constitute ‘powerful knowledge’.

So how do we decide what powerful knowledge is? Young says that “the knowledge on which maths or history as GCSE subjects is based has a form of universality derived from two sources: 1. How mathematics has been developed by specialists in the universities, and 2. How school maths teachers select and sequence mathematics content in ways that their theory and experience tell them is appropriate for the majority of learners at different ages.”

Meanwhile, in his SSAT pamphlet on Principled Curriculum (2013), Dylan Wiliam sets out four purposes of education which you may find useful in terms of articulating the goals of your own curriculum. These four ‘purposes’ are as follows:

1. Personal empowerment: Arguably the most important aim of education is to allow young people to take greater control of their own lives, perhaps best exemplified by the work of Paulo Freire. The idea is that rather than simply enculturating young people into the existing systems, education is the means by which people ‘deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world’ (Shaull, 1970).
2. Cultural transmission: Another reason that is often given for educating young people is, in Matthew Arnold’s words, to pass on from one generation to the next, ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’ (Arnold, 1869). Those who do not know what people are expected to know are regarded as ignorant – not stupid, but simply lacking the knowledge expected of them.
3. Preparation for citizenship: Democratic citizenship arguably works only if those who are voting understand the choices they are given, and education therefore has a vital role to play in preparing citizens so that they can make informed decisions about their participation in democratic society (Council of Europe, 2010).
4. Preparation for work: As a number of reports from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development have shown, more educated workers are more productive (e.g. Hanushek & Woessman, 2010). Educational achievement is therefore inextricably linked with economic prosperity.

Returning to Michael Young, he says that the purpose of education “is to enable all students to acquire knowledge that takes them beyond their experience. It is knowledge which many will not have access to at home, among their friends, or in the communities in which they live. As such, access to this knowledge is the right of all learners as future citizens.”

Young is therefore arguing that the purpose of education, and therefore the goal of our curriculum, is to achieve social justice and improve social mobility.

We know that the attainment gap widens as children travel through our education system. Indeed, disadvantaged learners fall two months further behind their peers each academic year and by the end of secondary school the gap is nearly twenty months.

Young argues that all learners have an entitlement to knowledge that takes them beyond their own experiences. It’s important to note that the ‘powerful knowledge’ that Young argues all learners should be taught is distinct from the common-sense knowledge they gain through everyday experience. Rather, it is systematic in that it is based on concepts that are related to each other in groups we call disciplines rather than rooted in real-life experience, and is specialised in the sense it is developed by experts in clearly defined subject groups who work in fields of enquiry with socially and historically fixed boundaries.

I will add one final thought on the purpose of education, one which alludes to the central image used on the cover of my new book: the head, hand, and heart…

A good curriculum – one which is broad and balanced, and designed to prepare learners for future success – provides opportunities for them to acquire academic knowledge (a curriculum of the head), to acquire practical skills and talents, including in the arts (a curriculum of the hand), and to develop personal skills and attributes (a curriculum of the heart).

Peter Hyman, in an article entitled Success in the 21st Century (2017), defined the head, hand and heart as follows:

Head: An academic education [that] gives people in-depth knowledge of key concepts and ways of thinking in science, maths and design, as well as history and culture. This knowledge should be empowering knowledge […] but importantly it should be shaped and applied to the needs of the present and future.

Hand: A can-do education that nurtures creativity and problem-solving, that gives young people the chance to respond to client briefs, to understand design thinking, to apply knowledge and conceptual understanding to new situations – to be able to make and do and produce work through craftsmanship that is of genuine value beyond the classroom.

Heart: A character education that provides the experiences and situations from which young people can develop a set of ethical underpinnings, well-honed character traits of resilience, kindness and tolerance, and a subtle, open mind.

Hyman added that “Variety, depth, scholarship and real-world learning are all important components of a 21st century education that balances head, heart and hand. There is a value in short mastery lessons on grammar. A value, too, in the scholarship of studying Shakespeare, Chaucer or medieval England in depth – not for their relevance but for their own sake. But there is also a growing case for connecting learning to the real world. Giving students real experiences and placements that develop the six attributes [of] eloquence, grit, spark, professionalism, expertise, craftsmanship.”

For more top tips on curriculum design, take a look at Matt’s book ‘Intent Implementation Impact: How to Design and Deliver an Ambitious School Curriculum’, which is available in paperback and ebook now. Visit our bookstore for details.

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