#94: The Purpose of Education - Gert Biesta (Notes)

Wen Xin Ng
Jul 20
5 min read

Listened to this podcast episode featuring Gert Biesta, and thought it was useful in providing the language and images to use when discussing the purpose of education.

Current Understanding of Purpose of Education: Education is for Learning?

AI has exposed the limitations of traditional assessment methods like written text production. We must rethink how we question and evaluate learning.
Saying “education is about learning” is not enough. We must also ask: "What is the learning that matters?" Computers can learn, artificial systems can learn. What is distinctive about human beings is that we are moral beings, and we can (and should) ask, “What should I do with what I’ve learned?” Forgetting this moral and ethical dimension of learning means missing a crucial part of what it means to be human.

3 Domains of Purpose of Education

Qualification
- We often reduce education to be just about learning, and the task of the teacher is to support or facilitate learning, but we must also ask: "What is worthwhile to learn?"
- Qualification isn’t just about credentials, but equipping students with tools for living: skills, understanding, capabilities.
- Qualification is a vital task of education — but not the only one.
Socialisation
- Even when teachers claim to focus only on knowledge, they’re making value judgments about what knowledge is “valuable", or to focus only on knowledge.
- Education always communicates traditions, cultures, and norms — explicitly or implicitly.
- Socialisation provides students with orientation in the world. Educators must consider: "What kind of world are we opening up for our students? What kind of opportunities do we give them to get a sense of what matters there?"
Subjectification
- The aim is for students to become subjects of their own lives—not mere objects influenced by external forces telling them how to be or what to think. Questions to ask include:
  - "What matters to you in all of this?"
  - "What are you going to do with what you've learned?"
  - "Are you responding to the world as yourself, or just reacting to expectations?"

A helpful image: three-dimensional chess — qualification, socialisation and subjectification are three boards stacked vertically. A move on one affects the other 2 fields. Teachers must act with awareness across all three domains. It’s difficult, but essential, because even if we make a move just in the domain of knowledge or skills, that communicates something about traditions, practices, values, it does something with the student as subject.

Example: [Qualification/Socialisation] Teaching history as memorisation [Subjectification] signals that students only need to perform, not engage meaningfully/have their own relationship with it.
Students are perceptive—they recognise what “counts.” If the system only rewards performance, they’ll follow that. But they won’t be touched in any meaningful way.

We often hear: “Let’s focus on the basics first—reading, writing, counting. Then we can deal with the rest.” But this raises a deeper question: "What is truly basic or fundamental in education?"

What if the most basic question is actually the question of subjectification: "Who is the learner becoming?" If we fail to address this fundamental dimension, then everything else—skills, knowledge, test scores—becomes immaterial. The heart of education is not just what students can do, but who they are becoming and how they take up their place in the world.

Raising Awareness of Students' Own Existence

“I still remember when a student said, ‘You know, you never give an answer to any question we ask.’”— I could answer most of their questions, but that’s not the point. What’s more interesting is opening up the possibility for students to work toward the answer themselves. This becomes part of your habitus as a teacher: digging deeper, helping students grow curious and creative.This is the art of teaching—where all decisions are situated and responsive to your students and context, but always anchored in the bigger purpose.

Good teaching often involves playing the question back to the student, not because the teacher lacks the answer, but to cultivate subjecthood. If students believe their job is only to find and regurgitate “right answers,” we fail to create space for them to take responsibility for their own learning. Questions like “What makes you say that?”, “Why do you think that?” encourage deeper inquiry, reflection and ownership.

Rethinking Expectations

When we speak of “high expectations”, we're often referring to high expectations in terms of the task we give to students. But the highest expectation we can give to students is to ask the student: “Where are you in all of this?” True education is not just seeing a task as something they need to perform on, but something that may have significance for their lives in the future.

Distraction for Education?

Surrounded by Answers
Education is flooded with “answers” and promises of improvement. Like, if you do it like this, then in a couple of years, all problems will be solved. But we rarely ask: “What question is this answer responding to?" Governments increasingly push “evidence-based” education—often based on narrow, correlational data focused only on qualification. Lists of “high-impact” teaching strategies are misleading if they ignore the broader purposes of education.
Idea and Importance of Belonging
Belonging is crucial — no one should feel they don’t have a place in education. But too strong a sense of belonging can suppress critical thinking. A balance is needed: feeling at home, and questioning the nature of that home. Beyond "What is it that I belong to?", students must also ask: “Is this where I want to belong?" Education must help students consider: "What will you do with your freedom?"

Future of Education? Role of Teachers?

There’s growing talk about replacing traditional schools with flexible, real-world learning environments—where learners gain practical knowledge without needing teachers.
But:
- The school is precious. It’s not outdated.
- The teacher is not just a facilitator. Teaching is a gift—not of control, but of opening up new worlds and posing difficult questions.
- Curriculum should open up worlds students didn’t even know existed or didn’t know they had access to.
- Education needs protected time and space for deep, meaningful learning. That’s what school offers.

World-Centred Education: Rediscovering Teaching

Educational theory swings between child-centred learning (discovery, autonomy) and curriculum-centred education (knowledge, structure). Biesta proposes a third approach: world-centred education. We need both a child and a curriculum. The educator’s job is to bring them together, to prepare students for a life in the world.
The world is not merely an object to study. It demands a response. In the same vein, other people are not learning objects—they are conversation partners. The world knocks on our door and asks: "Where are you?" Education must prepare students to respond to the world’s questions, not just answer pre-set ones.

Asking Better Questions

Progress in education (and all fields) comes not from having better answers, but from having new questions.
If we accept current questions and just generate more answers, we stay stuck in where we are and we can't see that each question is always limited; it looks in a particular direction, or it gives particular parameters for answering the question.
Each question frames the way we see the world—so we must reflect critically on the questions we’re asking.