ABSTRACT
The question of the purpose of education has a long history among educational thinkers; on European grounds our literal tradition goes back at least to Plato and the ancient Greeks. However, it has been noted that writings about the aims of education are now less common than 2–3 decades ago. This has made it easier for utilitarian and purely instrumental conceptions of education to become commonplace (Standish, 2006). Standish even quotes a 1996 White Paper from the European Commission, Teaching and learning: towards the learning society, in which it is poignantly stated that the arguments about the aims of education are now finished: the purpose of education is simply to serve the economy. And that appears to be how many, even a majority of people, today actually think. Another reason for the lack of discussion of educational aims may be the one-sided focus on learning in present educational discourses, academic as well as non-academic (Biesta, 2010). The focus on learning itself and how to enhance it blinkers out the question of the ends of learning, of what is to be learnt and why.
