Essay on What Is the Purpose of Education

Speaking about what is the purpose of learning, I would like to focus on the approach of Gert Biesta. In the European Journal of Education, Research, Development and Policy, Gert Biesta tries to argue the purpose of education in the context of a discussion of the problematic impact of the language of learning. He suggests that the term ‘learning’ does not say much about what the learning is ‘about’ and ‘for’. To him, the purpose of education should not just be about just learning, which students can do from anywhere, not necessarily school, especially with the Internet being made available, but that they learn something, from someone, and for a reason.

Biesta opines that education should be oriented into three main domains of purpose, and these domains are subjectification, socialization, and qualification. Qualification is the provision of knowledge and skills that justify schooling. Socialization is the act of behaving in certain ways that represent the culture, traditions, and beliefs system of a place or a system. Subjectification is better stated as awakening a want to strive to live one's life in the world, without considering oneself in the center of the world; it's about arousing a desire to try to live one's life in the world, without considering oneself in the center of the world. He sees it from the perspective that school provides the opportunity to slow down, attempt, fail, try again, and fail better. Biesta sees subjectification as the quality of a person.

Secondly, he contends that three trends that have emerged as part of the ongoing professionalization of teaching and can be found in various manifestations and facets of the school system – treating students as clients, being accountable, and replacing subjective judgment with scientific proof – are undermining rather than enhancing opportunities for teacher professionalism.

Another point made in his argument is the central role of judgment. Biesta believes that there should be a judgment of what is to be achieved in all three domains of the purpose of education to create a balance. He identified that sometimes teachers make judgments on what domain a child should focus on at a particular period, and with this, there should be trade-offs between the three domains. He opined that teachers need to make judgments on their pedagogy, curriculum, class organization, etc. To him, education sometimes needs to be flexible and tailored towards individualized learning, and sometimes it needs to be strict and structured. Education can sometimes focus on the student and other times on the teacher or the curriculum.

Gert Biesta’s purpose of education, especially in the subjectification domain, is rooted in the works of Homer Lane, whose account was given by A. S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill School. Lane founded his school to provide young boys and girls from 'tough' backgrounds (often criminal records) a second, third, and occasionally fourth opportunity. He achieved this not by punishment, behavioral interventions, or a tight 're-education' program, but rather through freedom. Rather than taking away his students' freedom, he returned it to them in the hope that they would connect with it and turn it into their 'own' freedom.

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Another author who put freedom as specified in Biesta’s subjectification was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, He stated that an educator's job is to shield education and children from significant outside pressures. “It is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man”, says the famous opening statement of his ‘Emile, or On Education’. He argues how education can help children and young people to obtain ‘sovereignty’ considering the societal and natural forces they are subjected to.

When an inquiry into the purpose and quality of education was initiated in November 2015, Robin Alexander wrote a report to the House of Commons Education Committee. The review consisted of ten subjects and 100 questions. Five of the questions questioned the purpose of education, and the following were the goals. “What is the purpose of primary education? Considering the country and society in which our children are growing up, what individual, social, cultural, economic, and other situations and needs should this period of education be primarily focused on? What are the basic values and ideals that it should uphold and promote? How far can a national system reflect and respect the values and aspirations of the many different communities – cultural, ethnic, religious, political, economic, regional, and local – to which it purportedly caters? How far ahead is it conceivable or sensible to look when imagining the future purposes and shape of this stage of education?” (Alexander, p.523, 2010). At the launch of the inquiry, the Chairman of the Education Committee said: “In this inquiry we want to ask the question, what is education for? ... Is it, for example, to prepare our young people for the world of work? Is it to ready our children for adulthood and provide them with the skills to lead fulfilling lives? Is it to provide them all with broad academic knowledge, based on a shared culture and values?” (Carmichael, 2015). The findings suggested that education should pursue all of these purposes and in so doing eschew the common tendency to treat them as mutually exclusive. He criticized the recent policy about the national curriculum that has concentrated on the first of the purposes at the expense of the others. He opines that the present policy produced a curriculum that rightly prioritizes literacy and numeracy, but is ambivalent about science while treating the arts and humanities as desirable but inessential; that elevates the basic skills of reading, writing, and calculating over those of orally communicating, relating successfully to others, solving problems and striving for the common good; that pays more attention to children’s test performance in a limited range of capacities than their development as rounded individuals; and that has little to say about education’s role in addressing pressing national and global challenges such as cultural diversity, poverty, inequality, social fragmentation, climate change, and sustainability. Alexander and his team saw the aims of education from three broad perspectives: the individual; self, others, and the wider world; learning, knowing, and doing.

The purpose of education as outlined by Gert Biesta has tried to investigate the real reason for education rather than the problematic idea that education is about learning and teaching is the facilitation of learning, but see the teleological character of education and create a balance amongst the three domains as he suggested.

In December 2018, the Australian Federal Minister for Education announced an impending revision of the Melbourne Declaration, the document which sets out the aims of the goals of education in Australia. Don Carter in his research article ‘Restoring Purpose: Applying Biesta’s three functions to the Melbourne Declaration’ advocates the use of Biesta’s three purposes as an interpretive lens for the next iteration of the Melbourne Declaration to ensure attention is afforded to all three purposes, particularly subjectification. To him, Biesta’s three purposes – ‘qualification’, ‘socialization’, and ‘subjectification’ – should be utilized as an interpretive framework to identify the functions as embedded in the key Australian educational document: the Melbourne Declaration. The application of these purposes provides insight into the “multidimensionality of educational purpose” (Biesta, 2013, p.128), allowing the multiple purposes of education as embedded in the Declaration. And by doing so, this analysis represents the extension of Biesta’s work into an Australian context, and through using the purposes as an interpretive framework, provides new knowledge by illuminating the educational purposes inherent in the document. The purpose of Don Carter’s paper is to reveal the extent to which Biesta’s three purposes of education (qualification, socialization, and subjectification) are present in the Melbourne Declaration.

It is worth noting that Gert Biesta’s three purposes have received both acceptance by some schools of thought and rejections by others. Personally, I believe Biesta’s purpose of education will spur changes in education policies gradually around the world to focus on the aims he highlighted. This will bring about a shift in how educators see themselves and the role of the learner and policymakers.