What is the purpose of education and are we asking the right questions?

“I think school should be a place people want to go, a place that doesn't just have right or wrong. It is about growing your mind, not just, this is right, this is wrong. Rather like, how did you get that?” 

– Freya, age 10

For a few years, the question of the purpose of education dominated my waking thoughts. I remember asking some young people I worked with why they went to school. Straight away they responded with, 

“So we can get a good job!” 

“So we can be successful adults!” 

Unfortunately, my face has a very inconvenient habit of displaying exactly what’s going on inside my head. “I can see from your screwed-up face that we’ve given you the wrong answers,” one of them said. It wasn’t necessarily that they were the wrong answers, it was just that I was frustrated that this seemed to be the most common answer people gave me.

When you start to think about it though, it’s wild. Children in Australia spend more time at school than in any other country in the world. This means that their development as human beings is significantly impacted by their experiences within these institutions. Yet, the focus seems overwhelmingly skewed toward preparing them for a single utilitarian outcome: the workforce. Is it possible that the driving force behind education might be about more than shaping individuals to fit nicely and neatly into an economic system?

When you ask people to think a little more deeply about the purpose of education, they will inevitably come up with richer and more nuanced answers. They’ll say education is about learning to become good humans and contributing members of society. But does our education system reflect or prioritise these answers? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, not really. 

Right now, our education system focuses on one way of being and doing. There is an emphasis on achievement, productivity, efficiency, individualism, competition, and standardisation. Everyone born within a certain period must reach the same milestones at the same time or they are deemed ‘behind’. Academic subjects such as maths, English, and science are prioritised. Learning happens within the confines of the four walls of a classroom. The teacher directs (or guides, depending on the teacher) students through a standardised curriculum that everyone in the state must follow. Subjects are siloed. You are a good student if you can sit still, complete the work on time, get good grades, and perform well on tests like NAPLAN. Students must compete for everything from awards, privileges, and test scores to university places and internships. Within this system, what you want to be is much more important than who and how you want to be. 

So what are we missing? The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I was pondering the wrong question. You cannot determine the purpose of education without going deeper and asking one fundamental question first: what does it mean to be human? 

Our education system, as it stands, does not prioritise this question; rather, it reflects the values of a dominant economic and political system that governs what it means to be human in ways that maintain the status quo. We need to peel back the layers to understand the difference between what it really means to be human and what the stories we’ve been conditioned to believe about ourselves as a species tell us it means to be human. In unpacking this, we can begin to design an education system that supports the next generation to live and learn in ways that enable their magical human potential. I almost didn’t use that word but I think humans are pretty magical. 

The question of what it means to be human is a mega one. People across the world have been searching for answers for millennia. It’s complex and I’m not foolish enough to think that I can even begin to cover it. But maybe the need to ask the question is more important than the answer. When we centre this question in our lives and the work we do, we are less likely to create solutions that prioritise thriving systems over thriving humans. We need to keep asking it as often as possible to ensure we stay on a human path of our choosing, instead of veering off into economic and political fairytales of other people’s making.

What do you think? Are we asking the right questions? What does being human mean to you? Let us know on Instagram and Facebook or reach out today.