Gert Biesta on the three purposes of education

From Taking Education Seriously: The Ongoing Challenge:

With regard to the question of purpose, I have suggested that education actually has three purposes — or, more precisely, three domains of purpose — to attend to. I have referred to these as qualification, socialization, and subjectification. Qualification has to do with education’s task of providing children and young people with knowledge, skills, and dispositions, but also — and more importantly — with insight and understanding that will qualify them to act, either in specific vocational and professional fields or in their daily life as citizens and members of society. In other words, qualification is about providing students with the “equipment for living,” to use Kenneth Burke’s nice phrase.¹³ Socialization has to do with education’s task in providing students with a degree of orientation into traditions, cultures, and practices. Here, education is a matter of initiation, a way of inviting students to “find their (own) way around,” so to speak. This is about gaining a “sense” of what matters in particular cultures, practices, and traditions, including a sense of the values that are at stake. Again, this can be understood narrowly — an introduction into nursing, car mechanics, or physics — but also more broadly, such as an introduction into life in contemporary society.

If education is only about qualification and socialization, there is always the risk that it turns into a form of training in which students are merely seen as objects that need to become qualified and socialized. Yet, unlike training or indoctrination, education should be interested in students leaving school and living their own personal and professional lives well. All education is thus interested in students’ independence, that is, in providing each student with a fair chance at being the subject of their own life, rather than the object of what others — whether individuals, groups, or more abstract forces such as capitalist social media — may want them to be and do. This is the “madness” of subjectification, to use a word from Derrida,¹⁴ that must “watch” over qualification and socialization to ensure that they do not turn into technologies of control. But there is a degree of madness in subjectification as well: to begin with, as educators we hit the paradox of wanting to promote the freedom of our students by educational means — that is, by in some way interfering with their lives — which can easily go wrong.