What is the purpose of education?

The one continuing purpose of education, since ancient times, has been to bring people to as full a realization as possible of what it is to be a human being. Other statements of educational purpose have also been widely accepted: to develop the intellect, to serve social needs, to contribute to the economy, to create an effective work force, to prepare students for a job or career, to promote a particular social or political system. These purposes offered are undesirably curbed in scope, and in some instances they conflict with the comprehensive purpose I have indicated; they imply a distorted human existence. The wideranging purpose includes all of them, and goes beyond them, for it seeks to encompass all the dimensions of human experience. —Arthur W. Foshay, “The Curriculum Matrix: Transcendence and Mathematics,” Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 1991.

(Available at: https://files.ascd.org/staticfiles/ascd/pdf/journal)