The academic year is now in full swing, curriculum changes loom in England, Gen AI is raising fundamental questions for the education sector. To launch this year's blog cycle, Nicola Tierney asks, what is the point of education?
Why are you here?
What made you want to work in education? What were the hopes and ambitions you held for the learners you would work with? What, for you, was the point of them being in your classroom, lecture hall, workshop or seminar? Has it changed?
Providing physical space and support for learning is a fundamentally political act. It decides who will be helped to acquire the knowledge and social skills needed to be able to participate fully and critically in society. It decides which knowledge is necessary and important to be taught. What is decided depends on how the purpose of education is viewed. That vision shapes everything from the pedagogies we embrace to the role we attribute to teachers.
Where is education going?
Recent government statements in England would suggest that education should be focused primarily on job training. Given current employment figures and prospects, it is a politically useful stance to take as long as one assumes that the fault is insufficient education rather than insufficient job opportunities. According to news reports, the soon to be published Milburn Review will suggest that even in early primary school, children should be taught about jobs (Karpel, 2026). Why? Are the high levels of young people not in education or employment in England really the fault of insufficiently motivated learners? Rising Higher Education application figures would suggest motivation is not lacking, but should getting a job really be the sole motivation and goal of education? I would argue not.
A simple reason why not is that no-one has been able to predict what industry or technology-related jobs will be needed 10 years into the future for quite some time. The professions which have endured are those grounded in human interaction. A more important reason why not therefore is that the skills, attitudes and capacities which are required by society have remained remarkably consistent across centuries. And yet it is these which appear to be consistently undermined by contemporary shifts in educational policy and priority.
Learning from the past
For millennia, three liberal arts underpinned education: the art of grammar (in a far broader sense of the term than is now used), in other words learning about how the world is or was; the art of the dialectic, questioning how the world is or was; and the art of rhetoric, communicating your evaluation of how the world is and showing how it could be (Robinson, 2013). In other words, education which helped you to acquire, challenge and communicate knowledge. This knowledge was considered prerequisite to any study related to the natural sciences or other liberal arts. These are not outdated capacities otherwise why do we still value Shakespeare’s plays for his understanding of human nature? They are not irrelevant skills otherwise why is oracy such a focus in schools? They are not without value in the job market otherwise why do employers seek out critical, creative and ethical thinkers?
The role of the teacher
And what is the role of the teacher in all this? The notion that a curriculum is ‘delivered’ diminishes the intellectual work and identity of teachers (Pring, 2015). The current wave of curriculum packages and increasingly prescribed pedagogical approaches (Traianou et al. 2025) put forward in the name of consistency, workload reduction or teacher support would seemingly have us believe that teachers can simply ‘deliver’ content that all students will learn in the same way regardless of circumstance. It would also have us believe that teachers are not, or should not be, seen as professionals capable of making educational decisions which benefit their pupils.
What educational role then does the teacher play? Giroux (2024) argues for a rethinking of teachers as transformative intellectuals who play a role in reproducing and legitimising different political, economic and social interests through the pedagogies they use. He reminds us that all human activity involves some form of thinking. And so we return to the Trivium. Yes, teachers need knowledge to teach. But it is the capacity of teachers to question their knowledge, their practices and the outcomes they produce that allows them to become reflective practitioners. The tension this produces is where the intellectual work of teaching lies. How do they create the conditions which equips all students with the knowledge and courage to become active and critical participants in society? Only the ability to communicate clearly allows them to teach, to challenge what they are asked to teach, to advocate for their pupils, to teach others how to advocate for themselves.
The question therefore remains. What is the point of education? If education is about readying people for work, is the goal to nurture the creators, innovators, thinkers and leaders of the future or simply to mass produce employees? Surely only the former entails the promise of creating employment possibilities? If education is about citizenship, what price the world where education does not defend critique, challenge and transformative communication?
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
is a senior lecturer in Primary Education (Mathematics) at where she is also co-lead of the Pedagogy, Practice and Policy research group in the She is also the editor of the Pedagogy in Action blog.
The purpose of this blog is to empower educators in any field or stage of education to share their pedagogical experiences, to challenge and advocate for different educational practices, to give voice and recognition to the intellectual work which we engage in daily. We would love to hear from you if you are interested in sharing your story. Please email .
St Mary’s has 175 years of experience in teacher education, and Ofsted rates our provision ‘Outstanding’. Postgraduates can choose between a and a . For undergraduates, the combines a degree with Qualified Teacher Status, so you graduate ready to teach in primary schools.
Giroux, H. A. (2024) Teachers as Intellectuals : Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning. Bloomsbury Academic.
Karpel, H. (2026) ‘Employers should teach primary-age children about work, says Milburn’, BBC News (online), 1st October 2026.
Martin, J. (2018), “Skills for the 21st century: Findings and policy lessons from the OECD survey of adult skills”, OECD Education Working Papers, No. 166, OECD Publishing, Paris, .
Prime Minister’s Office (2026) ‘PM: ‘From today Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap’, 27th July 2026 [Press release].
Pring, R. (2015) Philosophy of educational research. 3rd edn. Bloomsbury Academic.
Robinson, M. (2013) Trivium 21c: Preparing young people for the future with lessons from the past. Independent Thinking Press.
Traianou, Stevenson, Pearce and Brady (2025) “Are you on slide 8 yet?” The impact of standardised curricula on teacher professionalism. Report for the National Education Union (NEU). National Education Union. Available at: