Creating a fully encompassing curriculum around the purpose of education

What is the purpose of education?   If a button were pressed, and you found yourself with a blank slate for deciding what would be educationally worthwhile to teach, how would you go about deciding?  The essential place to start would be through gaining clarity on exactly what the ‘purpose of education’ is. However, once you start researching such a thing, you rapidly realise that there is wide disagreement about exactly what the starting point might be (Parsons, 2015). According to Dewey (Dewey, 1934), ‘Any education is, in its forms and methods, an outgrowth of the needs of the society in which it exists.’ In tolerant modern democracies, our cultures are so multifarious that it can be difficult to gain clarity or consensus on what we want our school system to focus on.  With the founding of the National Curriculum for England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 1988, the goal of education was defined as the delivery of a ‘balanced