This session brings together practitioner-researchers from India, South Africa, and Peru with a call to re-examine one of education’s most enduring questions: What is the purpose of education—and whose purpose does it serve?
Hosted by Dream a Dream (India) and anchored in the Network for Education Systems Transformation (NEST), the session is co-organised with the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education (CUE), SmartStart (South Africa), and Enseña Perú (Peru). It explores how narratives of purpose shape education system transformation so that we could collectively reimagine what our systems value, whose knowledge they centre, and which futures they make possible.
The speakers will share early ideas from their ongoing inquiry into the purpose of education, offering stories and reflections from their own content, ecosystem and practice. Through presentations and discussions, the session will surface plural histories and epistemologies that seek to re-centre education around care, belonging, and justice rather than control and compliance.
By the session’s end, participants will encounter multiple, sometimes contrasting, visions of education in policy and practice. Rather than offering a single answer, the dialogue leaves participants with sharper questions, shared language, and starting points for reshaping policies, practices, and partnerships around a more relational purpose of education.
