Prof. Gert Biesta: What Is Education Actually For? A Philosopher's Answer | EPS 018

What is education actually for? It sounds like a simple question. But it may be the most important question in education, and it is one that most education systems have quietly stopped asking. In this episode of Deep Thinking with Dr. Steven Stolz, Dr. Steve sits down with Prof. Gert Biesta of the University of Edinburgh, one of the world's most important and original philosophers of education, for a conversation that goes to the very heart of what education is, what it should do, and why so much of what currently passes for education may be missing the point entirely. Prof. Biesta has spent his career developing a body of work that is both philosophically rigorous and urgently practical. His books, including "Good Education in an Age of Measurement," "The Beautiful Risk of Education," "The Rediscovery of Teaching," and "World-Centred Education", have been translated into multiple languages and have shaped education debates across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia. He is one of the most cited education scholars in the world. In this conversation, Dr. Steve and Prof. Biesta explore: 📚 The three purposes of education: qualification, socialisation, and subjectification, and why subjectification, the most important of the three, is the most neglected 📚 "Learnification" — Biesta's landmark concept describing how education discourse has been quietly hollowed out by the language of learning, outcomes, and measurement, hiding the crucial questions about content, purpose, and relationship 📚 Why the shift from talking about education and teaching to talking about learning has been far more damaging than it appears 📚 "The Beautiful Risk of Education" — why attempts to eliminate risk, uncertainty, and difficulty from education make it un-educational, or even anti-educational 📚 Teaching as interruption — why genuine teaching is not about facilitating what students already want, but about presenting them with genuine otherness that challenges their existing orientations 📚 World-centred education — what it means to put the world, rather than the child or the curriculum, at the centre of education 📚 The difference between helping students express their existing subjectivity and the genuine process of subjectification — becoming an independent subject 📚 Why education must be, in Biesta's word, "obstinate" — why giving people what they say they want is not education's task 📚 The problem with reducing teaching to research, and when educational research serves education versus when it undermines it This is episode four of the 2026 season "Reconsidering Education", following conversations with Fred W. Stolz OAM on educational leadership, Stanford's David Labaree on why schools don't change, and UMass's Jack Schneider on the politics of educational evidence. 🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & Amazon Music 📺 Watch on YouTube:    / @stevenstolz   📱 Follow: @DeepThinkingPod 🌐 stevenstolz.com 🔗 Prof. Gert Biesta: gertbiesta.com | edwebprofiles.ed.ac.uk/profile/gert-biesta #PhilosophyOfEducation #GertBiesta #Learnification #Subjectification #WhatIsEducationFor #EducationPhilosophy #TeachingAndLearning #EducationReform #BeautifulRiskOfEducation #WorldCentredEducation #DeepThinking #DrStevenStolz #EducationPodcast #Podcast #CriticalEducation #PedagogyMatters