Life Purpose and Identity: Articulations and Implications for Education

Abstract

The relationship between identity and life purpose has been highlighted both by the legal frameworks that define the life purpose as the axis of basic education in Brazil and by studies on life purpose published in the country and abroad. Nevertheless, documents such as the Common National Curricular Base and the New High School do not provide theoretical foundations that would enable education professionals to know how identity and life purpose are constructed and articulated, as well as to understand their pedagogical implications. At the academic level, in turn, the relationship between identity and life purpose has been little discussed explicitly and systematically. The present article, of a theoretical nature and inscribed in the interface between the fields of education and psychology, explores the articulations between studies on life purpose and identity concerning the constitution, development, and functioning of these constructs, and discusses their implications for education. To do so, it delimits the concept of life purpose to the perspective founded by the Center for Adolescence Studies at Stanford University (United States), coordinated by William Damon, and circumscribes the processes of identity construction and functioning to the approaches of identity status, narrative identity and moral identity, whose common matrix is the work of Erik Erikson.