What is education ultimately for? While the answers have long been debated, rapid advances in digital technologies and artificial intelligence are encouraging us to reconsider many of the assumptions that have shaped education systems for decades. In this article, Prof. John Traxler explores the competing purposes that education has historically been expected to serve, from supporting economic and social priorities to fostering personal development and informed citizenship. He considers how digital technologies and artificial intelligence are reshaping these long-held perspectives and reflects on what this means for educators, learners and the future purpose of education itself.
What’s the Purpose of Education?
Author: Prof John Traxler, UNESCO Chair, Commonwealth of Learning Chair and Academic Director of the Avallain Lab
St. Gallen, July 27, 2026 – There has always been debate and confusion about the nature and purpose of education and how educators should respond to the different views and pressures being expressed. Some of the most pragmatic and widespread have been about the economy and employment, placing learners into jobs, while others have emphasised the obligation of education systems to produce good citizens, good parents, entrepreneurs and artists.
The growing presence of digital technologies within our societies and economies changes some of these pressures and views, while also changing how education systems can respond to them. And now, artificial intelligence accelerates and intensifies all of these pressures, adding new possibilities and new problems, often faster than education systems or indeed the edtech sector can respond. This blog from the Avallain Lab unpacks some of these pressures, problems and possibilities in order to give colleagues and clients a broader perspective.
Defining the Tension: Education vs The System
It is perhaps sensible to distinguish between ‘education’ and ‘the education system’ and to accept that there is a difference. The education system is not merely an abstract entity or the specific organisations and institutions that deliver education, and does absolutely nothing else. The education system, and its organisations and institutions, is often obliged to do and deliver all manner of things that might challenge understandings of ‘education’. Precisely because the education system serves many different stakeholders, it is often expected to fulfil purposes that extend beyond education itself.
Of course, countries, communities and cultures differ, and thus so do their understandings of education; furthermore, understandings within individual communities, countries and cultures, among families and individuals, will also differ. Education systems in democracies can, however, embrace many of these different and probably divergent understandings by not exposing them or discussing them too much, ‘letting sleeping dogs lie’ or not exploring too deeply what they might mean in practice or what they might tell us about our community, culture or country that we would rather not acknowledge.
The idea that the education system is basically and cynically a political device supporting a conservative political or economic elite is one such understanding. It is exemplified by the notion that the system is essentially a crèche that frees up parents to service the economy by making them available for employment. It is also reflected in the notion that increased participation in further or higher education hides youth unemployment, a critique often levelled at the UK’s various ‘youth opportunities’ or skills training in the 1980s, which compulsory national service does in many other countries.
Another example is the notion that there is some kind of ‘hidden curriculum’ intended to produce the next generation of compliant consumers, passive citizens and docile workers. There is moreover a notion that education, whatever it might mean, is the engine of social mobility, that education will enable the acquisition of riches, whereas quite often it might be that riches enable the acquisition of education and thus reinforces a state of social immobility, or more crudely for example, from an affluent family you can afford to stay on at school and then progress to a university education.
The Systemic Pressures on Modern Education
These various depictions, even if plausible, need reworking as the 4IR (the fourth industrial revolution), the synergy of data communications, the internet of things, digital technologies, robotics and, of course, artificial intelligence, bites ever harder. This is effecting the ongoing ‘hollowing out of the labour market’, the erosion of jobs as the machines take over, eventually leaving only jobs for the likes of street sweepers and brain surgeons, at the two extremes, everything in the middle having disappeared.
If there is, in fact, a cynical and political understanding of the education system, then it will need to embrace increasingly widespread unemployment and the widespread social tensions that accompany it. We could extend this interpretation to suggest that education systems, at the same time, will also have to address the apparently ever-increasing geopolitical instability as the post-war so-called ‘rules-based world order’ disintegrates and will have to address how climate change stresses economies, environments, infrastructure and populations. These are big challenges, not separate, disconnected or unrelated.
Utopian vs. Dystopian Perspectives
There is also what might be called a utopian alternative to this previous dystopian analysis, namely that education systems are intended in some vague way to produce well-rounded individuals. They are articulate, cultivated, liberal, balanced, creative and wholesome; somehow better citizens, neighbours, voters, parents and perhaps these days, ones that are resistant to demagogy, extremism and crass materialism. This might be reflected in the German notion of Bildung, the Renaissance Man (man, really?) or the Confucian ideals of harmony, order and stability. However, because of its abstract nature and intangible outcomes, it is harder to operationalise and evaluate than the dystopian alternative.
It is very, very possible to see these two versions as identical in substance but merely viewed through two different lenses. It is also possible to ask whether education systems lead societies, follow societies or merely reflect them. Leading societies might expose educators to accusations of presumption and arrogance in the case of the utopian version, whereas following societies may expose educators to accusations of compliance, complicity and subservience in the case of the dystopian one.
More consensual, explicit and obvious understandings are somewhere in the middle. Producing well-rounded individuals, while a noble aspiration, might be viewed as inadequate if such individuals are unemployable, not only when they leave the education system but also throughout their lives. Lifelong learning is one sensible and acceptable response, developing the necessary generic skills, attitudes, knowledge and abilities while not seeming to be mere ‘training’. Training is, however, always lurking in the wings, ready to pounce and appropriate the nobler ideals of education to produce, for example, ‘jobs-ready graduates’ and taxpayers. However, it has to be said that any hoped-for alignment of the education system to the needs of the economy is far from perfect, still producing more poets than plumbers.
Economic Realities and the ‘Hidden Curriculum’
The needs of the economy can also be softened to embrace the nurturing of innovators, creatives and entrepreneurs, and the advocacy of social mobility and lifelong learning, as ways to meet new economic challenges without engendering excessive social or political disruption. The ‘hidden curriculum’ can be re-presented around ‘soft skills’, the need to work together, to be polite, cooperative and tolerant, to speak persuasively, to discuss intelligently and to interpret instructions, oiling the wheels so to speak rather than crashing the gears.
The noble ideals of education now seem to be eroding at both ends. The argument that industry and commerce ought to provide their own training rather than expect the education system to do it for them is long since lost. Now, however, we also hear of those children first entering the education system needing to be potty trained and lacking a range of other basic social or physiological skills. Clearly, in the worst-case scenario, education systems are often servicing both employers and parents.
How Educators Should Respond
So how should educators respond now? Sadly, educators are usually someone’s employees. They may not have much freedom of action and thus may need to seek support and ideas from all the stakeholders involved in our analysis. Educators themselves are also at risk of being ‘hollowed out’. Moreover, to what extent, in discussing the impact of artificial intelligence on education, are we portraying a version of the status quo ante or a dramatically transformed world? It affects the range of educators’ responses.
From the perspective of education as merely serving the economy in various ways, the responses are simple: continue to serve the economy, albeit a radically changing one, in which the wider social and political repercussions will also need to be managed and contained. From the perspective of education as having a ‘higher’ mission, there is an as-yet poorly understood and evolving relationship between education and knowledge. If education is about the acquisition of knowledge, has artificial intelligence not changed not only how knowledge is acquired but also what knowledge actually is now? Not only which new knowledge is now useful or which old knowledge is no longer useful, but also what is actually the nature of knowledge, and how that now determines our understanding of education and learning.
Navigating Knowledge in an AI-Driven World
Historically, there was a transformation as networked computers became widespread. We moved from knowledge being about knowing stuff to knowledge being about knowing where to find stuff, where navigation replaced recall. Discrete knowing minds had been joined or replaced by networked ones in constant interaction, and the network of knowledge became more important than its nodes. Referring back to the earlier remarks about social immobility, education might not be about what you know but who you know, and how affluence will get you into those parts of the education system to meet them; the acquisition of ‘social capital’ masquerading as ‘educational capital’. Maybe artificial intelligence will change nothing.
At the same time, personal digital technologies, including social media and Web 2.0 applications, became ubiquitous and pervasive, and knowledge became personal. We could each generate, share and consume our own, but this meant knowledge also became fragmented, transient and subjective. Education, in its ‘higher’ sense, is still struggling to redefine its purpose in this new knowledge economy, but artificial intelligence is now widely available, amplifying and accelerating the fragmentation and uncertainty around knowledge, thus further problematising the purpose of education.
For the time being, education may enable learners not only to find things but also to tell good from bad, useful from useless and benign from malign. Apparently, new technologies, AI in this case, are first used to solve problems thought to be difficult, then to solve problems that are impossible, and eventually to solve problems that were previously inconceivable. We are, with regard to knowledge, knowing and education, for the time being in those early phases, taking responsibility to help learners navigate critically and competently through what is out there. That responsibility may become more important than ever as artificial intelligence continues to reshape our relationship with knowledge.
About Avallain
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