Education as an ontology of freedom: revisiting the purposes of university education

This article is a meditation of a reimagined university education experience that prioritises unfinishedness and slowing down. Considering what is at stake in our current political moment, I discuss an ontology of education as freedom to rethink the university as a space that humanises education and sees the practice of being with and within the world as instrumental to life – long-learning. Education must be reconceptualised so that it is not merely something that prepares one for future employment, denoting a beginning and end, but instead, has the potential to be ongoing and open-ended. An education understood in this way is fundamentally an evolving process that is liberatory, unfinished, and undetermined. It is not enough to simply theorise and reinterpret the purposes of education, but just as important is it to interrogate the consequences of not doing so.