Upholding “the educational” in education: Schooling beyond learning and the market

Abstract

This article argues that schooling’s driving purpose should be to educate. Given heightening global crises and the potential of education to respond, we agree with the spirit and focus of UNESCO’s (2021) A new social contract for education intervention. Education/schooling should be motivated by progressive, critical visions to contribute to more sustainable and just human and planetary futures. Embodied-affective-cognitive technologically-mediated processes of becoming educated, however, are not a force that can smash injustice or ecologically destructive capitalism. Educationally speaking, there is no shortcut to cultivating students as “change agents” for sustainable futures. Hannah Arendt’s essay “The crisis in education” (2006) is instructive in clarifying the function of schooling and in categorically distinguishing adults from children, education from politics, and education from learning. While human learning proliferates in multiple ways independent of existential/ethical mooring, education ultimately requires committed adults spending time with, and socioemotionally and intellectually supporting, children to deepen their understanding of the world and others, giving meaning and significance to their/our lives as part of larger collectives called upon to sustain and renew a common world.