The question of what education is ultimately for has a way of resurfacing at moments of political and economic strain. In Sweden, a bitter debate over the proposed closure of Vikbolandsskolan, a school on the rural Vikbolandet peninsula, has forced a reckoning between the logic of austerity and the fabric of local life. Fewer children are being born and class sizes are shrinking, the argument for consolidation runs, yet critics insist that shutting a rural school unravels an entire community, sentencing children to punishing commutes and lower life quality. With less than half of its teachers fully qualified and every fifth pupil leaving without complete grades, the school embodies systemic neglect. The struggle in Norrköping is not isolated. In Spain, where a presidential campaign unfolds, editorialists note that while candidates tout employment, productivity and “21st-century skills”, they almost never pause to ask the deeper, prior question: “¿Para qué educamos?” – for what purpose do we educate? The silence points to a widespread crisis of meaning in education policy across Europe, where method is debated endlessly while aims go unexamined.

This European policy vacuum stands in quiet tension with a rich body of transatlantic reflection on individual purpose. Speaking at Jackson State University in 2016, former US First Lady Michelle Obama urged graduates to “choose a career that you believe in, something that doesn’t just make money but that truly makes a difference for others” – a sentiment that has gained traction as younger generations question inherited definitions of success. Oprah Winfrey’s oft-cited maxim, “Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life because you become what you believe”, casts ambition not as a material race but as an act of self-creation. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, went further, writing that “a tree gives glory to God by being a tree” – an insistence that authenticity, not imitation, lies at the heart of a well-lived life. Each of these figures, in a different register, challenges the notion that education or career should be reduced to a transactional exchange of skills for wages.

Contemporaries from the world of management and psychology add a further layer. Peter Drucker, the management thinker, famously declared that “Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.” His point – that meaningful work is learned through doing, iterating and refining – resonates with the urgency of fast-changing labour markets. The psychotherapist Carl Rogers offered a complementary idea: the only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and to change. In an age of accelerating technological disruption, Rogers’ definition turns education into a lifelong capacity rather than a certificate to be filed away. Viewed together, these insights form a counter-narrative to the narrow metrics that dominate ministry spreadsheets and campaign talking points.

The convergence of these debates – from the fate of a small Swedish school to the philosophical questions posed by Drucker and Rogers – reveals a structural gap in how modern societies think about learning. Policymakers in Stockholm and Madrid, like their counterparts in many capitals, have grown adept at measuring outcomes while neglecting the ultimate ends those outcomes are meant to serve. The rising chorus of voices, from former first ladies to contemplative monks, does not offer a ready-made curriculum, but it does force a necessary confrontation: before deciding what to teach, how to test and which schools to close, societies must first recover the courage to ask why they educate at all.