Overview
The question of what paramount purpose official education provided in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions should serve has often been answered with education for employment. While there are many merits to this argument, there is a broader, more inclusive and more compelling purpose, which both includes and transcends education for employment — education for freedom.
Education for freedom is intentional guided study for the purpose of extending our range of knowing relevant to living a life of self-determination as free citizens within the context of a liberal secular democratic society. It is not in opposition to, but rather inclusive of, education for employability. Intentional guided study for employability provides us with the opportunity to extend our range of knowing that is relevant to performing meaningful work and achieving an adequate income. Education for freedom extends our possibilities for achieving happiness through leading a life of authentic choice and rational, well-informed action befitting free human beings within the social and cultural context of a liberal secular democratic society, and within the context of an equitable economic system which functions in harmony with the planet's ecosystem (an economic system which provides sustainable sufficiency of goods and services).
Education for Employment
In An Educology for Freedom (2021), the argument is advanced that education for employment as a purpose for official education in schools has obvious instrumental value. A skilled workforce is a desirable asset for any economic system. Labor, in sufficient numbers and with the relevant skills, is required to produce and distribute the goods and services that are needed and/or demanded by the consumers within an economic system. But an economic system which poses an existential threat to the world's biosphere, as well as to the human species, all the while failing to provide at least minimum requirements for the welfare of all humankind — not just for a privileged minority — is a system which requires serious examination, analysis and reform.
It is patent that intentional guided study for employability does not, on its own, provide opportunities to learn an adequate range of knowing to address and resolve the challenges posed by an economic system that, on a global scale, is simultaneously (1) predicated on the imperative of unlimited growth within the context of limited resources, (2) inequitable to an extreme degree in its maldistribution of goods and services (scarcity amongst plenty), and (3) annihilative, both environmentally and existentially, through pollution, depletion of resources (renewable and non-renewable) and pandemic diseases.
Education for Freedom
In An Educology for Freedom (2021), it is argued that education for freedom is intentional guided studying for the purpose of extending our range of knowing relevant to living a life of self-determination as free citizens within the context of a liberal secular democratic society. Education for freedom is inclusive of environmental education — intentional guided studying for making intelligent, well-informed choices and decisions and taking effective action in addressing and resolving the environmental challenges which confront contemporary society, including (1) the dangers posed by unlimited economic growth within the context of limited resources, and (2) the existential threats which arise from global warming, pollution, scarcity and pandemic disease. It is clearly not an adequate education which prepares children, youth and adults only to accept passively, to fit into and to contribute to an existentially destructive economic system of production and consumption. If the status quo of unlimited economic growth is leading humankind to self-annihilation, then it is patent that intelligent, well-informed action must be taken to emend the status quo — and the requisite intelligence and information can be developed from education for freedom.
Education for freedom is also inclusive of civic education — intentional guided studying for participation in liberal secular democracy. To enjoy the fruits of a liberal secular democratic society (which include the freedom to engage in self-determination), we must have access to the rights and opportunities which our society offers, we must know how to use those rights and opportunities constructively, we must be able to discharge the responsibilities which our society requires of us, and we must know how to maintain and/or improve the way that our society functions — socially, economically, politically and culturally.
Implications for Curriculum and Policy
The challenges brought on by incessant physical, social and cultural change require new knowledge and new ranges of knowing. The inference to be drawn from this state of affairs of perpetual change is that the curricula of official education at primary, secondary and tertiary levels ought to give paramount importance to critical thinking as the most important intended learning outcome of any educational program. Critical thinking as an intended learning outcome implies the intended learning outcomes of (1) knowing-to conduct inquiry, as a matter of lifelong habit, to answer questions, resolve issues and solve problems; (2) knowing-that inquiry is the rational way to resolve questions and solve problems; and (3) knowing-how to conduct inquiry effectively and productively.
Only through persistent, continuous and well-disciplined inquiry — outside of and beyond socialization, enculturation, indoctrination and education — is it possible to develop the postconventional range of knowing requisite to deal constructively with physical, social and cultural change, personally and collectively. Studying intentionally under guidance to achieve conduced learning of the habits and skills of effective inquiry is the essence of education for freedom.