Abstract 

The article argues that the purposes of education, not confined only to schooling, must be relevant to the conditions of the times, which can be summed up as a polycrisis, a combination of complex, interconnected and existential crises that are more than the sum of their parts. Yet despite the warning provided by the recent pandemic, there is still an absence of democratic discussion about the purposes of education, which under neoliberalism have been reduced primarily to a narrow economic rationale. The article considers some of the implications of the polycrisis for education, and concludes with the need to rethink the school given the conditions of the times and the need to repurpose education.