What's the point of education?

For much of human history, education has served an important purpose, ensuring we have the tools to survive. People need jobs to eat and to have jobs, they need to learn how to work. Education has been an essential part of every society. But our world is changing and we're being forced to change with it. So, what is the point of education today?

Today we largely view education as being there to give us knowledge of our place in the world, and the skills to work in it. This view is underpinned by a specific philosophical framework known as pragmatism. Philosopher Charles Peirce – sometimes known as the "father of pragmatism" – developed this theory in the late 1800s.

Pragmatism sees any concept – belief, science, language, people – as mere components in a set of real-world problems.

In other words, we should believe only what helps us learn about the world and require reasonable justification for our actions. A person might think a ceremony is sacred or has spiritual significance, but the pragmatist would ask: "What effects does this have on the world?"

Education has always served a pragmatic purpose. It is a tool to be used to bring about a specific outcome (or set of outcomes). For the most part, this purpose is economic.

Why go to school? So you can get a job. Education benefits you personally because you get to have a job, and it benefits society because you contribute to the overall productivity of the country, as well as paying taxes.

In the early part of the 20th century, John Dewey (a pragmatist philosopher) created a new educational framework. Dewey didn't believe education was to serve an economic goal. Instead, Dewey argued education should serve an intrinsic purpose: education was a good in itself and children became fully developed as people because of it.

Much of the philosophy of the preceding century – as in the works of Kant, Hegel and Mill – was focused on the duties a person had to themselves and their society. The onus of learning, and fulfilling a citizen's moral and legal obligations, was on the citizens themselves.

Dewey's view was that learning doesn't just occur with textbooks and timetables. He believed learning happens through interactions with parents, teachers and peers. Learning happens when we talk about movies and discuss our ideas, or when we feel bad for succumbing to peer pressure and reflect on our moral failure.

Learning would still help people get jobs, but this was an incidental outcome in the development of a child's personhood. So the pragmatic outcome of schools would be to fully develop citizens.