Education has become a concern bordering on an obsession in most of the industralized world. Its centrality to competitiveness, social inclusion and wellbeing are now widely recognized. But most efforts at reform still divide between efforts to boost the output of an increasingly worn institutional infrastructure, and hype-ridden strategies based on untested use of new technology. This article sets out the major challenges facing education systems, questions their fundamental purpose and then explores avenues to the reinvention of whole systems of learning and teaching.