2 - New Answers to ‘Why’

Summary

Economic growth is not the underpinning purpose of schools, thriving is. There already exist some possible accounts of what thriving as a purpose might mean. Jacques Delors for UNESCO developed a humanistic account of education's purpose as including learning to be and learning to live together. Others advance 'twenty-first-century skills' as key outcomes. The OECD has taken a competency-based approach, defining competence as knowledge plus skills plus attitudes plus values. In this model, competence aims towards individual and societal well-being. However, in a time of climate risks and biodiversity loss we have to think beyond the individual human or even society. Humans are a part of a bigger ecology of which we are a part; and we must attend to this planetery thriving as much as to our own.