Prof. Gert Biesta: What Is Education Actually For? A Philosopher's Answer | EPS 018
What is education actually for?
It sounds like a question with an obvious answer. Schools exist to teach children. Teachers exist to help students learn. Education exists to prepare young people for adult life. But push on any of these answers and they begin to unravel, because they don't actually tell us what education is for. They tell us what it does, or what we hope it does. The deeper question, the philosophical question, is what it should be doing, and why, and for whom.
Prof. Gert Biesta of the University of Edinburgh has spent his career asking exactly that question, and refusing to accept easy answers. He is one of the world's most important and widely read philosophers of education, the author of landmark books including "Good Education in an Age of Measurement," "The Beautiful Risk of Education," "The Rediscovery of Teaching," and "World-Centred Education," and one of the most cited education scholars globally. His work has shaped education debate across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia.
In this deep and wide-ranging philosophical conversation, Dr. Steven Stolz and Prof. Biesta explore what education is genuinely for, and why so much of what currently passes for education may be systematically missing the point.
At the heart of the conversation is Biesta's argument that education serves three distinct purposes, qualification, socialisation, and subjectification, and that the third of these, subjectification, is both the most important and the most neglected. Qualification is about equipping students with knowledge, skills, and credentials. Socialisation is about introducing students into existing cultural and social orders. But subjectification, the process of becoming a genuine subject, an independent human being who can exist in and with the world in a mature and responsible way — is what most education systems have quietly abandoned in their rush to measure, standardise, and optimise everything else.
In this conversation, Dr. Steve and Prof. Biesta explore:
The three purposes of education: qualification, socialisation, and subjectification, and why they exist in fundamental tension with each other in ways that cannot simply be managed away
"Learnification" — Biesta's landmark concept for the process by which education discourse has been hollowed out by the language of learning, outcomes, and student-centredness, hiding the crucial questions about content, relationship, authority, and purpose that education cannot afford to ignore
Why the shift from talking about education and teaching to talking about learning represents a far more serious philosophical and practical problem than it appears on the surface
"The Beautiful Risk of Education" — why attempts to eliminate uncertainty, difficulty, and risk from educational encounters make education safer in appearance but un-educational or even anti-educational in practice
Teaching as interruption — why genuine teaching is not the facilitation of what students already want or already know, but the presentation of genuine otherness that challenges students' existing orientations and opens them to the world
World-centred education — what it means to put the world, rather than the child or the curriculum, at the centre of educational thinking and practice, and how this reframes what teachers are actually there to do
The crucial distinction between helping students express and affirm their existing subjectivity versus the genuine educational process of subjectification — and why simply affirming who students already think they are is not education
Why education must be "obstinate" — why giving people what they say they want, or what data systems say they need, is not the task of education, and why this is not elitism but a genuine defence of what education is for
The problem with turning teachers into researchers, and when educational research genuinely serves teaching versus when it quietly undermines it
What "world-centred education" demands of teachers, schools, and education systems — and whether current structures are capable of providing it
Prof. Gert Biesta is Professor of Public Education at the Moray House School of Education and Sport at the University of Edinburgh, and Visiting Professor at University College London and NLA University College, Norway. He is one of the most widely read and cited education scholars in the world, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
🔗 Prof. Gert Biesta: gertbiesta.com | edwebprofiles.ed.ac.uk/profile/gert-biesta
🌐 Show notes and resources: stevenstolz.com
This is episode four of the 2026 season of Deep Thinking, titled "Reconsidering Education." Previous episodes in this season: EPS 015 with Fred W. Stolz OAM on educational leadership and legacy, EPS 016 with Prof. David Labaree of Stanford on why schools were never meant to change, and EPS 017 with Prof. Jack Schneider of UMass on the politics of educational evidence and the fight for public education.
Deep Thinking with Dr. Steven Stolz is produced in Adelaide, Australia and releases every second Wednesday on all major platforms. Hosted by Dr. Steven Stolz, educator, philosopher, and academic at the University of Adelaide.
