Rethinking the Purpose of Schooling: Why Executive Functions Matter in a Changing World

During my career in education, I’ve often returned to a deceptively simple question: what is the purpose of schooling?

It is a question that rarely has a fixed answer. Instead, it shifts with society, with technology, and with changing expectations about what students will need in their futures. If we look back to the early 1900s, schooling in many systems reflected the needs of an industrial world. Education was largely designed to prepare students for predictable roles, where following instructions, working within routines, and operating in standardised systems were highly valued.

In the post-war era, the emphasis shifted towards academic achievement and professional pathways, with education increasingly seen as a route to skilled employment and national economic development.

Today, however, we are preparing our students for a very different context. They are growing up in a world defined by rapid change, complexity, and uncertainty. Access to knowledge is instant, but knowing what to do with it can be challenging. Careers are no longer linear, indeed, the idea of a “career for life” has largely disappeared, replaced by the need for ongoing learning and adaptability.

So the question becomes more urgent: if the future is uncertain, what are we actually preparing children for?

Across global frameworks such as the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, a consistent pattern emerges. Skills such as analytical thinking, resilience, creativity, adaptability, curiosity, empathy, and self-awareness are repeatedly highlighted as important for the future workforce. While these are projections rather than certainties, they point to a broader shift. The emphasis is moving away from knowledge as an endpoint, and towards how individuals think, adapt and manage themselves when things get complex.

This has important implications for education. Knowledge remains essential, the challenge for learners is not simply acquiring information, but being able to use it flexibly in unfamiliar and changing contexts.

This is where executive functions become central to the debate. Executive functions refer to the cognitive skills that help us manage our thoughts, emotions, and actions so we can plan, prioritise, resist impulses, and solve problems. In classrooms, these skills are visible every day, even if they are not always named. We see them when a child pauses before beginning a task, when they resist distraction, when they persist with a challenge, or when they adjust their approach after realising something is not working. These are not simply learning behaviours; they are cognitive processes that underpin learning itself.

Research consistently shows that executive functions are strongly linked to both academic achievement and wellbeing. When children can regulate their attention, manage impulses, and adapt their thinking, they are more able to engage deeply, persist through challenge, and make sense of complex tasks. Without these skills, even students with strong factual knowledge can struggle, not because they do not understand, but because they find it harder to organise, apply, and regulate that understanding in real time.

This is why executive functions should not be viewed as an add-on to learning, rather they are foundational. When children develop them, they become better learners, able to drive their own learning. 

Teaching these skills is tricky, even when we know they are important, it is often difficult to know where to start. This is where a framework like SOWATT becomes a powerful tool, helping us move from theory into visible, intentional practice in the classroom.
Through the SOWATT lens, executive functions are translated into observable dimensions of learning:
•    S – Self-regulation: managing impulses, emotions, and behaviour so learning can continue even when tasks are challenging
•    O – Organisation: planning, prioritising, and setting goals in relation to time, physical space, information and resources
•    W – Working memory: holding information in mind long enough to use it
•    A – Attention: selectively concentrating, sustaining focus, and refocusing when distracted
•    T – Thinking flexibly: shifting perspective, adjusting strategies, and adapting when initial approaches do not work
•    T – Thinking about thinking (metacognition): reflecting on strategies, monitoring understanding, and making learning processes explicit 

From this perspective, classroom behaviours can be reinterpreted as expressions of developing cognitive skills.
A child who pauses before reacting is demonstrating self-regulation.
A child who prepares materials and plans their approach is engaging in organisation.
A child who holds instructions in mind while working is using working memory.
A child who sustains focus despite distractions is exercising attention control.
A child who changes strategy when something does not work is showing cognitive flexibility.
A child who can explain their thinking is engaging in metacognition.

Viewed this way, SOWATT provides a shared language for what is often invisible but constantly present in learning. It allows educators to move beyond simply noticing behaviour, and instead begin to name the thinking processes that drive it.

The implications are significant. When teaching is viewed through an intentional lens such as SOWATT, we are not only delivering curriculum or managing behaviour. We are actively developing the cognitive systems that allow learning to happen. Executive functions are not fixed traits. They develop over time through experience, language, modelling, and practice. This means classrooms are not just spaces for knowledge acquisition, but environments where thinking is shaped through everyday interactions.

Therefore, perhaps one of the most important shifts in education today is the growing recognition that we must focus not only on what children learn, but how they learn. This is why the idea of “learning how to learn” is increasingly seen as essential. While content will continue to change and technologies will evolve, the ability to think flexibly, regulate oneself, and persist through challenge remains constant.

SOWATT sits directly within this space, bridging cognitive science and classroom practice by making executive function development visible, intentional, and explicitly teachable. In doing so, it reframes the role of the teacher, not only as a deliverer of knowledge, but as an intentional developer of thinkers.

Returning to the original question what is the purpose of schooling? a clearer picture begins to emerge. Schooling is no longer just about preparing students for known futures. It is about preparing them for unknown ones. It is about developing learners who can think, adapt, and manage themselves in uncertainty. And it is about recognising that this does not happen by chance. It happens through intentional teaching, through language that makes thinking visible, and through frameworks like SOWATT that embed executive functions into everyday learning – helping students develop the capacity to learn for life.