I have, in common with many others, been inculcated to accept an assumption that education is the process of preparation for being something else, that it is a means to the arrival at a desirable destination. The problem, however, is that you never quite get there. When you get through one round of education you discover that somehow the target has moved and in fact you have only got through to another level of preparation for another ‘something’ or another ‘somewhere else’.
This assumption is necessarily built on another – i.e. that you are not “fully cooked”. Education, it turns out, is a sort of perpetual game of “jam tomorrow”, an insoluble problem of identity formation. What if we have this idea about our education system back to front? What if we assumed instead that everyone who came to education was already “there”? In other words, and to paraphrase (crudely) Alan Watts, how would things change if we were to assume that education is not so much about being on probation for when you ‘really’ start being a proper person, in a future that is separate and remote from now? What if its function were to wake you up to the idea that all those distinctions between past, present and future identities are false? Here, the assumption becomes “It only ever happens in the now”.
I suspect that very few managers who come back to school for their MBA would be happy with the idea that they were already there, even though that’s one of the things they might accept when, on reflection (you might say), it’s all over.
Just a thought while I reflect on the past few days here in Trinidad and wait for the car to the airport.
Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog 
Very good. This is a manifestation of the western ‘purpose driven’/’goal driven’ approach.
But surely, “preparation for something else” should more properly be called ‘training’.
And ‘education’ is (as the word’s latin root tells us) about “drawing out” or “leading out” or “facilitating out” what is already there.