Education Bookcast

One central question which I find very difficult to answer is "What is education for?". There seem to be many parallel purposes, most of which are subjective, ill-defined, and hard to measure. It is difficult to navigate between the Scylla of unrealistic expectations far from the core activities of school (e.g. developing well-adjusted entrepreneurial job-ready good citizens) and the Charybdis of uninspiring flat-footed apparent irrelevancies (e.g. hoping that they at least remember Pythagoras' Theorem). However, there is one aim that seems to me to pass both of these criteria: the ability to use what one has learned in novel situations. It seems absolutely necessary to make for a justifiable education - after all, if you are unable to apply your knowledge anywhere outside of the classroom, what's the use of learning it in the first place? On the other hand, it also seems eminently achievable and related to real classroom content. Application of what one has learned to new scenarios is known in the psychology