CASE 3 · INSTITUTIONAL FUTURES · RESEARCHER C
What is education for?
“What is the ultimate ideal goal or purpose of formal education?”
How the Studio approached it
Two complete Round Tables were run. The first worked within the Western tradition (positions in the lineage of Plato, Aristotle, Dewey, Freire, hooks, Nussbaum, Rawls and Sandel). The second drew on global traditions (Confucius, Xunzi, Ikeda, Nkrumah, wa Thiong’o, Menchú, Dussel and Ibn Khaldún). The inquiry was framed from the outset for a practical setting: use in university ethics courses, and administrative decisions about AI tools in education.
Note: The Studio also has Scenario Planning modules which create the ‘traditional’ 2×2 matrix of possibilities. The researcher ran this question on both a Round Table basis and with the full Scenario Planning module. Only the Round Table version is shown here for simplicity.
Epistemic Honesty — Sophistication without false grounding
The analysis generated a high level of theoretical sophistication while openly acknowledging low empirical grounding. Educational purposes turned out to be position-dependent, varying with one’s location in power relations (dominant or oppressed), cultural-philosophical tradition, underlying ontology of personhood (individual or relational), and historical context (stable, oppressive, threatened, transitional).
The Studio stated the limit explicitly: “There is no single answer that all reasonable people must accept. This is not a failure of analysis but an accurate mapping of philosophical terrain.” That sentence is the quality control doing its job — refusing to launder a contested value question into a confident recommendation.
Actionable convergences
Even with that diversity, the two Round Tables converged on four commitments that held across every framework — enough to guide institutional decisions without suppressing the deeper disagreement about ultimate ends. Education must:
- cultivate agency;
- engage with inherited knowledge;
- prepare people for participation in collective life;
- acknowledge the power structures that shape access to education.
Tested against the institution’s own framework
The output was then run against a specific institutional instrument: the 8 Key Questions for Ethical Reasoning framework used campus-wide at James Madison University (included in this example courtesy of JMU). This showed the methodology adapting to a bounded, real-world context — philosophical rigour preserved, but the output reformatted for a particular use case and a particular set of stakeholders.
Faculty reported that the analysis gave them vocabulary and structure for discussing AI in education that avoided both uncritical adoption and reflexive dismissal — in their words, food for thought and application, not judgements.
What this case demonstrates
The first two cases show the method handling open philosophical questions; this one shows it scaling into an institution without losing its discipline. The same commitments — separating the phases of analysis, tracking uncertainty, detecting vacancy, refusing premature synthesis — all held inside a bounded context with practical stakes.
The result enriched deliberation without dictating the outcome, preserved space for legitimate disagreement while surfacing convergences an administrator can actually act on, and kept philosophical standards intact while serving a specific institutional need.