The critical analysis of current educational institutions is claiming for their urgent transformation, although not for their elimination. Considering this, the important question is how to conveniently clarify the basic tendency on which today´s educational reforms should be based. But it is becoming progressively clearer that education is a complex phenomenon and that there are diverse components and a number of elements intervening in its implementation and results (Gento, S., 2002). We have particularly considered the need of clarifying the definition of appropriate results or, which is the same, what is the true product of an education of quality. This is particularly relevant in the context of Europe and within the European Union in the framework of the programme ‘Europe 2020’

The educational product, understood as the basic entity of education or (which is the same) as the specific authentic result that education should produce, must be the basis or ground to a curriculum reshape. The particular educational product of an educational institution is, obviously, centred on the attainment of ‘education’. But this general idea, involves itself a diversity of components that should be specified, explicitly stated and made operative, in order to facilitate its subsequent assessment. 

Education implies a typically human process, implemented through an intentional and integrating process, in order to optimize the behaviour most convenient to each individual in his/her own environment and context: this process is basically consisting of knowledge acquisition, automation of ways of behaving and internalisation of attitudes that give him/her valuable quality in general and in his/her own peculiarities.

 As a consequence, we consider education as the integral promotion of a human being in all his/her dimensions and peculiar features. This meaning of integrality compels us to consider education as a product in terms of a human being’s global promotion.Nevertheless, the need to understand the components of this unitary promotion forces us, first of all, to identify such components; and, then, to profoundly study their content. After intensely reflecting upon them and on the essential meaning that education has, our conclusion is that the most important and specific contribution that education makes to the human being is values promotion (Gento, S., 2002: 67-83).

It may be considered that “most of the universal values that will be necessary to promote throughout XXI century have been inscribed, for quite a long of time, in the millenary traditions of great civilizations. These ones simply reflect the moral or ethical conceptions and the ideal of life, of humanity, of beauty, of justice and of freedom defended by our ancestors and magnificently maintained in the treasures of thinking” (Delors, J:, 1996: 287).

 We, as educational researchers, decided, after a conceptual analysis and a comparative study of the situation, that -in a nowadays integral conception of education– this one should essentially promote values derived from human being´s dimensions. As a consequence, the values to be promoted should be organised around the following types of formation: physical-emotional; intellectual; moral or ethical; aesthetic; civic-social, ecological, practical or utilitarian; and supernatural.

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