Why has the modern learner, self-motivated, technologically empowered, and fully in control of their educational journey, become education’s false idol? This chapter attempts to answer this by mapping out the ways in which schools and universities have been overtaken by learnification, Biesta’s deliberately provocative term for education’s reduction to learning processes. Through historical analysis, Biesta traces how three converging narratives, the critique of authoritarian teaching, the rise of constructivism, and the spread of neoliberal individualism, have emptied education of substantive purpose. But what emerges when we move beyond learning’s seductive promise? Biesta bids us to consider the purpose of education, and the chapter next introduces his most influential framework: education’s three interconnected purposes of qualification (developing capabilities), socialisation (cultural and professional initiation), and subjectification (becoming a subject capable of independent thought and action). While qualification dominates contemporary educational discourse, Biesta argues that subjectification represents education’s most essential yet precarious dimension. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of action and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of uniqueness, the chapter explores how subjects emerge not through predetermined development but through encounters with resistance that demand response. It ends with a compelling story from Homer Lane’s Little Commonwealth, illustrating how genuine educational encounters create conditions where students might discover their own capacity for responsible freedom.