During the period of mandatory schooling, education is a public good; therefore, it is a public service funded almost exclusively by public money. If our children already spend a large proportion of their active time in schools, we expect that the schools will contribute to the development of their personalities. However, the reason why we introduce a state monopoly into this service is our expectation that education will have a maximum social and economic impact by producing high and equally-distributed outcomes in the service provider institutions and by operating at the lowest possible cost. In other words, we are expecting the highest possible effectiveness, equity, quality, and cost-effectiveness. However, education is not generally effective; it is effective ac-cording to something. Thus, the first logical step is considering the aims of education against what we judge the effectiveness, quality, equity, and cost-effectiveness of the educational services. We will discuss later how goals and educational targets are set for education. What is needed here is a brief outline about how the aims of education (i.e., goals at the level of theoretical generality) can be considered in order to signal certain contemporary shifts of emphasis and to grasp the practical implications of these shifts.
When thinking about the aims of education, we can follow two dimensions: re-sponding to individual and social needs, as well as on the basis of the distinction between intrinsic or instrumental aims (Winch and Gingell 1999). In most cases individual and social aims are two sides of the same coin. For example, improving the social skills of individual students can be considered the condition for educating good citizens. It does not necessarily apply to the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental aims; there are certain aims that are rather related to the very nature of pedagogy, such as the devel-opment of personality (self-reliance, autonomy, identity, etc.) in children, while others are related to aims that are external to the teaching-learning process, such as serving the needs of the labor market or ensuring social cohesion. The difference flows from different references: in the case of intrinsic aims, the references are based on the anthropological and/or psychological foundations of education, while the references for instrumental aims are external to education, extracted from the economic and social environment.
However, these two kinds of aims are not opposable; whatever we emphasize, we should consider both types—of course, in the light of the actual emphasis.
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The typical aims of education that in most cases determine the goals set in an explicit or implicit way are the following (Halász 2001b):
• Cultural reproduction is the transmission of all those instruments (e.g., language) and content (e.g., accumulated common knowledge, values traditions, behavioral codes, etc.) that determines the communication pattern that we call culture. A widely shared simplification of this aim is the strong focus on the transmission of a set of knowledge that is considered to be the part of the cultural code of the well-educated middle class (the “intelligentsia”).
• The development of the personalities of individuals is the shaping and influencing the process through which those psychological characteristics of the individu-als develop and that determine their cognitions, motivations, and behaviors.
In fact, all other aims incorporate certain personality development goals as the basis of the teaching-learning process. The only reason for separating this aim is that it is often emphasized in contrast to any instrumental aims in order to
“protect” education from any external interference.
• Reproducing or changing the social structure. On the one end of the spectrum, there is the conviction that the main purpose of schooling is to imprint exist-ing inequalities in a society. On the other hand, there are others who consider education to be an instrument that alone is able to change the status of entire societal macro-groups.
• Economic function. The supply of skilled labor, according to the actual and future needs of the economy, is often referred to as the human resource development function of education. The relevance of educational services, in other words, its compliance and responsiveness to the demand on the labor market, is one of the main concerns. It is important to mention, that educational services do not simply serve the needs of the economy: education is the part of it. For example, the employment of teachers is part of the labor market, or the value produced by educational services contributes to the gross domestic product.
• Ensuring the integration of the society. In the broadest sense, this refers to all sorts of possible contributions by education to the requirements that ensure the operability of different, separate functional subsystems of a society (economic, political, cultural, etc.). In this respect this aim incorporates all the other ones.
In a narrow sense, however, it refers to the potential of education to reduce the inequalities among different groups that could endanger the stability of the society. This function is often believed to ensure social cohesion.
• Service providing functions are those that are beyond—or connected to—the core function of education that is a service by itself. In most countries schools
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are performing several supplementary functions that have very little or nothing to do with learning, such as welfare, health, cultural, or community services.
In most cases, they are justified by the contribution of such services to the core educational functions (e.g., hungry children cannot learn) or simply deployed to schools because other service providers would fail to reach out to their target groups, as in the case of some social allowances or dentistry for children. In all education systems there is an aspiration to connect educational and supplemen-tary services as much as possible.
• Modernization is especially emphasized in Central and South Eastern Europe, where “organic development” (that is, modernization through market mecha-nisms) would hardly ensure “catching up” to the most developed countries.
This function is emphasized in relation to certain aspects of development that are considered to be “modern,” for example, the use of information and com-munication technologies or the protection of the environment.
While again reminding the reader that the distinction is quite artificial, it can be added that the first two aims are mainly intrinsic ones, while the rest are rather instru-mental. It is important to keep in mind that education in and of itself is not the only factor that contributes to the achievement of any of these aims. In addition to this, the relevance of the different aims might vary across different levels and types of educa-tion. For example, in the initial phase of primary education even the most important instrumental aims are served mainly through the appropriate achievement of intrinsic ones. (That does not mean that external references are less important.)
Obviously, the choice among the emphasized aims of education is not independent from values. Also, it often happens that the political struggles in the “symbolic space” of politics result in the distortion of the real meaning of certain aims (such as setting “nur-turing” against “service” that is often heard in the region). However, what is important here is the distinction between different traditions that are not independent from the lenses of the various professions. According to the two dimensions of the possible aims of education—while taking the risk of unjust simplifications—there is a “pedagogical approach” putting greater emphasis on rather intrinsic aims (usually called the liberal tradition) that brings individual values, and there is a “public policy approach” (or in-strumental approach) that emphasizes the external (economic and social) references of the goals set for education.
The reason for using this somewhat ambiguous separation of the two traditions is to indicate a visible shift of emphasis from intrinsic to instrumental aims that has taken place over the last couple decades, with major implications for the governance of education.
This shift is a consequence of the ever-accelerating transition of the external references of educational services. Some of these changes are global ones, such as the use of new
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information and communication technologies. Meanwhile, there are others that are more specific to developed countries, such as the changing structure of modern econo-mies, which has a huge impact on the composition of the labor force, the fragmented configuration of the middle-class that diversifies the expectations of education, or the postmodern reappraisal of rigid, socially-bound cultural codes. Finally, there are those changes that have regional relevance, such as demographic declines that can nearly empty schools in rural areas. Likewise, a similar change is the transformation of the political superstructures of the society that result in changing the dynamics among their representative, corporative, and direct participatory institutions and that reorganize the power relations among different groups, each touting different expectations of educa-tion. The cumulative impact of all these changes is the increasing pressure on education systems to adjust to the weight of various public policy considerations at the expense of traditional “pedagogical” deliberation.
One of the reasons why various intrinsic and instrumental aims are often regarded as conflicting—or even mutually exclusive—is the perception that serving different goals should be achieved within the same limited teaching time. However, as will be seen in the next chapter, this contradiction exists only if we think that all the possible aims cor-respond to a certain pool of knowledge, that is, to the appropriate content of education.