Overview
An Educology for Freedom (2021) is Christensen's most explicitly normative work — a sustained argument about what education is for, developed through the framework he has spent four decades building. Its central target is the dominant contemporary conception of education as preparation for employment: the idea that the primary purpose of schooling is to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and credentials required by labour markets.
The Critique of Education for Employment
Christensen's critique of education for employment is not a simple rejection of practical preparation as an educational goal. It is a more fundamental argument about the relationship between education and freedom. The employment-orientation of contemporary education, he argues, instrumentalizes knowing — it treats knowledge as a means to economic ends rather than as a constitutive element of a free human life. When knowing is valued only instrumentally, the forms of knowing that are most distinctively human — knowing-to, the capacity for authentic rational choice — are systematically neglected in favour of forms of knowing (knowing-how, knowing-that) that are more directly employable.
The result is an education system that trains capable workers but fails to develop free persons — persons who can exercise genuine rational agency in the full range of human activities, not merely in the domain of paid work. This failure is not merely a regrettable side effect of economic pressure; it is, Christensen argues, a fundamental distortion of the educological purpose of schooling.
Freedom as Educological Goal
For Christensen, freedom in the relevant sense is not merely the absence of external constraint but the presence of the cognitive and dispositional capacities required for authentic self-determination. A person is free, in this sense, to the extent that they can form genuine preferences, reason about them critically, and act in accordance with their own values rather than the values imposed on them by habit, conditioning, or social pressure. This is precisely what knowing-to — the highest form of knowing in Christensen's taxonomy — is the capacity for.
An education for freedom is therefore an education that systematically develops knowing-to across all domains of learning — not merely the normative domain of ethics and citizenship, but the epistemic domain of critical thinking, the practical domain of skilled agency, and the aesthetic domain of discerning taste. It is an education that treats the development of rational autonomy as a constitutive goal, not as a side effect of preparation for something else.
Implications for Curriculum and Policy
The implications for curriculum are radical: an educology for freedom would reorganize the curriculum around the development of knowing-to at the postconventional level across all four domains of knowing, rather than around the acquisition of knowledge and skills that are directly employable. This does not mean abandoning vocational preparation; it means situating it within a broader educational project in which the development of free persons is the primary goal and vocational competence is a secondary benefit.