ABSTRACT
What is the role of education today? And what is there to do for educators-for teachers, parents, and all those who have an educational responsibility toward “newcomers”? These are diffi cult questions, both conceptually and in a practical sense. What do we understand by “education”? What does it mean to have an educational responsibility? Who has an educational responsibility? Where does such a responsibility come from, and what does it entail? And how can we capture and characterize what educational responsibility entails today? These questions are not only diffi cult; they are also urgent. The next generation cannot wait. Yet the most pressing problem might not so much be that of fi nding an adequate answer to these questions, although this should be done as well. The main problem today might well lie in the fact that there are too many answers. Or to be more precise: that there is too little doubt about what these questions actually mean and what they ask from us. The main problem
might well be that these questions are not considered to be diffi cult at all. There are, after all, clear answers available: The purpose of education is to secure a country’s competitiveness in the global economy. The purpose of education today is to transmit the knowledge, values, and dispositions of good citizenship. The purpose of education today is to make sure that students achieve the highest scores on international tests. And so on.
