The author starts by presenting the challenges of the endangered environment we live in, marked by growing populations, hypermobility, resources depletion, climate degradation, a promising as menacing artificial intelligence and bioengineering revolutions, the end of static and predictable labour markets, as well as the acceleration are steering the general dynamics intertwined with a narratives void connected to a growing fragmentation of our lives that faces change as the only constant. To what Education is appointed as the contemporary “key differentiator, namely in developing the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that enable people to contribute to and benefit from an inclusive and sustainable future. Character qualities and soft competencies appear as part of the social dynamics that implies civic participation and trust forming a kind of social glue, indispensable for creating the environment conducive to exhort the values, the attitudes and the behaviours of compromise, compliance, as well as of risk-taking, change and innovation that are needed. Secondly, the concept of competencies is discussed to show how knowledge, Know-How, attitudes and values are intertwined to compose a complex construct. Concluding that we need Humanities as we need Sciences and Mathematics, meaning STEM not just balanced with STEAM (Sciences, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics), but their integration foresaw as an indissociable whole, corresponding to the integrality of the conception we advocate for conceptualizing humankind. Thirdly, the teleological question is considered as fundamental and constitutive of education, meaning that as a practice it necessarily remits to an indispensable normative horizon of referents. The author proposes an antinomical approach to the functions of education, namely, qualification, socialisation and subjectification. Which thwarting that only accepts, at best, an adaptation which forces the subject to an operative that could destroy the space for the inclusion of differences is denounced and, pointing to teleological referent where, not only the educands are given a qualification but also the opportunity to grow through socialization processes and by opening the ways to construct their subjectification, without which they will never achieve the status of being authors of the own personhood, owners of their own lives, meaning that education ought to address the empowerment and emancipation of living minds. The person’s emergence and affirmation are stated as the core to articulate the values of interpellating the purposes of the current dominant regimen and envisage a breakthrough to emancipatory education.