Against flourishing as an educational aim

________________________________

Michael Hand
University of Birmingham

The idea that flourishing might serve as a central, foundational or overarching aim of
education has been championed in recent years by a number of distinguished philosophers of
education (see, for example, Brighouse, 2006; Brighouse, Ladd, Loeb and Swift, 2018;
Curren, 2012, 2013; de Ruyter, 2004, 2015; Kristjansson, 2016, 2017, 2020; Reiss and White,
2013; White, 2011; Wolbert, de Ruyter and Schinkel, 2015). Harry Brighouse, in his widely
read introductory volume On Education, declares: ‘The key idea in this book is that the
central purpose of education is to promote human flourishing’ (Brighouse, 2006, p.42). John
White, in Exploring Well-Being in Schools, asserts: ‘One of the purposes of education in a
democratic society is to equip people for a flourishing life’ (White, 2011, p.92). And Kristjan
Kristjansson, in his recent monograph Flourishing as the Aim of Education, writes: ‘this book
proposes to develop a conception of student flourishing (understood as students’ objective
well-being) as the overarching aim of education’ (Kristjansson, 2020, p.1). Indeed, the
enthusiasm with which educational theorists have rallied to this cause prompts Kristjansson
to speak of ‘the new flourishing bandwagon in education’ (p.26).

Still, there are dissenting voices. Among those who seek to derail the flourishing bandwagon
are Harvey Siegel (2023) and David Carr (2021). Siegel contends that the advocates of
flourishing have failed to provide a good argument for treating their favoured ideal as an aim
of education. Carr maintains that the conditions under which people flourish are so different
for different people that ‘the currently vaunted notion of flourishing is trivial to the point of
vacuity and can therefore serve no useful (theoretical) educational purpose’ (Carr, 2021,
p.391). We might call these, respectively, the missing argument objection and the vacuity
objection.

I am sympathetic to both objections. I think, however, that there is a third and more
fundamental reason to reject flourishing as an educational aim. It is, simply, that flourishing
is not the sort of thing a person can acquire by learning. Flourishing, that is to say, is a good
of the wrong logical kind to serve as an aim of education. I will call this the unlearnability
objection.

Flourishing enthusiasts minded to resist the unlearnability objection have two options open to
them. The first is to stretch the concept of education so as to include the pursuit of more
goods than the goods of learning. The second is to stretch the concept of aims so as to include
not only goods pursued by those engaged in an activity, but also wider ends furthered by the
achievement of such goods. If I understand them correctly, Kristjan Kristjansson plumps for
the former option and Doret de Ruyter for the latter. But neither holds much appeal.

My discussion is divided into three sections. In the first, I summarise and comment on the
missing argument and vacuity objections. In the second, I explain and defend the
unlearnability objection. And in the third, I consider and reject the two concept-stretching
responses to the unlearnability objection. I conclude that the impediments to mounting a
credible case for flourishing as an educational aim are formidable.
1
The missing argument and vacuity objections

According to Siegel, advocates of flourishing as an educational aim have failed to provide a

good argument for their view:

… why think that flourishing is an aim of education, as opposed to a view of well-being or

the good life, or an aim of life in general, rather than education in particular? Perhaps the
biggest lacuna in the literature is the lack of compelling arguments for regarding it as a basic
educational aim, as opposed to ‘an ideal of the good human life’. (Siegel, 2023, p.XX)

And again:

The main worry for the proposed aim… is that the proposal moves too quickly from
‘flourishing is a good thing’ to ‘flourishing is a basic educational aim’. The move from the
first of these to the second is, as far as I can see, without justification. (p.XX)

Siegel readily allows that flourishing is ‘an ideal of the good human life’, and one that many
people find attractive and plausible. It is, to be sure, an ideal with a distinguished
philosophical pedigree. But he rightly insists that ideals of the good human life, even very
respectable ones, cannot be installed without argument as basic aims of education.

Why not? For at least two reasons. First, ideals of the good human life may not be ends of the
kind that can be achieved by educational means. We should be suspicious of ‘good things’
masquerading as educational aims, Siegel warns, when ‘their connection to education’s
historical role in strengthening and enhancing student cognition and understanding… is less
than clear’ (p.XX). More on this later. Second, ideals of the good human life are multiple and
contested. As attractive and plausible as the ideal of flourishing might be, it is not the only
option. There are other conceptions of the good available and, in any case, not everyone goes
in for such conceptions. Some people direct their efforts towards overarching ends other than
flourishing and some manage their affairs with no overarching end at all. So, while we are
each at liberty to select flourishing as the end of our own lives, it hardly follows that we are
entitled to select it as the end of the lives of others. The onus is therefore on the advocates of
flourishing to explain why their favoured ideal of the good life should be adopted as a central
aim of education. And, in Siegel’s estimation, no such explanation has been forthcoming.

Note that the missing argument objection is not an objection of principle. Siegel does not
claim to identify a reason for thinking that arguments for flourishing as an educational aim
are bound to fail. His claim is simply that no good argument has yet been advanced. It may be
that an adequate justification of education for flourishing will be formulated at some point in
the future; but, as things stand, given the current state of philosophical play, education for
flourishing is unjustified.

Perhaps Siegel slightly exaggerates the ‘dearth of arguments’ (p.XX) advanced to date. At
least some flourishing enthusiasts have sought to provide justifications for their view. Randall
Curren, for example, attempts a Rawlsian veil-of-ignorance argument for flourishing as an
educational aim. If we knew ‘only general truths about human existence’ and nothing about
‘our own individual attributes and circumstances’, Curren proposes, the social institutions we
would choose would be ones that ‘enable us all to live well’:

2
 … we would agree that these basic institutions would include educational ones, with the
understanding that educational institutions are inherently ones that promote forms of
development conducive to living well. We could distinguish educational institutions more
fully by the fact that they promote such development by initiating learners into practices of a
kind that express human flourishing. (Curren, 2012, p.5)

Curren’s argument is not very persuasive. For those already enchanted by the ideal of
flourishing, it may be natural to suppose that parties in the original position would design
educational institutions to serve that end; but for those not yet in thrall to the ideal, it is hard
to see how stepping behind the veil of ignorance is supposed to reveal its merits as an
educational aim. But there is no doubt that Curren recognises the need for a justification and
makes some attempt to provide one.

Still, I think Siegel is right to complain of a ‘lacuna in the literature’ here. Few riders of the
flourishing bandwagon have taken the trouble to articulate an argument for their central
claim. Moreover, some of them are strangely insouciant about the worry that schools have no
mandate to promote a controversial conception of the good. Kristjansson writes:

… should the worry… be motivated by liberal… misgivings about education for flourishing
being essentially morally driven (i.e. non-value-neutral) and hence potentially open to
charges of paternalism and indoctrination, the simple response is that this worry seems to be
confined to a charmed circle of liberal thinkers and politicians. The overwhelming majority
of parents and practitioners… want schooling to have an explicit moral focus. It is not as if
such a focus is being foisted uncritically upon an unwilling population… It never ceases to
surprise me how much the ‘liberal’ worry continues to occupy the minds of those who take
on the task of defending (some form or another of) moral education in schools (see e.g.
Hand’s 2018 book) when other worries are so much more pressing. (Kristjansson, 2020,
p.175)

As the only denizen of the ‘charmed circle of liberal thinkers’ Kristjansson mentions by
name, let me briefly explain why I think the ‘liberal worry’ needs to be addressed. The worry
is not, of course, about paternalism: education, or at least the compulsory education of
children, is inherently paternalist. Nor is the worry that anything ‘morally driven’ or ‘non-
value-neutral’ in education amounts to indoctrination: the prohibition on indoctrinating
children requires neither that schools are value-free nor that they refrain from teaching
values. It is, specifically, that educational institutions lapse into indoctrination when they
impart beliefs or values by non-rational means of persuasion. And in the case of beliefs and
values that are epistemically controversial, it is hard to see how non-rational means of
persuasion can be avoided. A belief or value for which the available evidence and argument
is ambiguous cannot be reliably imparted on the strength of evidence and argument alone.

As I argue in the book to which Kristjansson refers (Hand, 2018), the prohibitions and
requirements of basic morality are robustly justified and can therefore be rationally taught in
schools. But the same cannot be said of flourishing as an ideal of the good human life. If, as it
seems, flourishing is but one conception of the good, and there is no decisive reason to favour
it over the alternatives, or even to favour it over doing without such a conception, then the
prospects of a rational education for flourishing are bleak. The reason schools have no
mandate to promote a controversial conception of the good is that reliably persuading
children to subscribe to a controversial ideal is bound to involve some degree of manipulation
or psychological pressure and is therefore ruled out by the prohibition on indoctrination. It
may be that the advocates of flourishing can satisfactorily address this worry, but it does need

3
to be addressed: it cannot be lightly dismissed on the grounds that most parents ‘want
schooling to have an explicit moral focus’, still less on the grounds that ‘other worries are so
much more pressing’.

Carr’s vacuity objection is that, because the ideal of flourishing can be realised in so many
different ways, it furnishes us with no useful guidance on either curriculum or pedogogy. As
an aim of education, it is vacuous:

… what might be the distinctive ergon or function of human beings as such? It seems that
the broad answer returned here by Aristotle’s teleological ethics is that it is to become
rational human agents – precisely capable, as such, of determining their own destinies
according to their own ideals or visions of flourishing as artists, doctors, philosophers,
farmers, soldiers, or whatever. But once this cat is out of Pandora’s bag (so to speak), the
prospect of finding anything much resembling a common criterion of flourishing – certainly
of much educational use – virtually evaporates. In sum, despite the common Aristotelian
aspiration to have one’s cake and eat it, the trouble is that to admit the self-determination of
human rational agency is more or less to abandon the prospect of finding any very significant
common human ideals, visions, or aspirations of what it is to fare well. (Carr, 2021, p.394)

The flourishing life of the artist looks very different from the flourishing life of the doctor,
and the flourishing life of the soldier looks different again. In particular, flourishing artists,
doctors and soldiers require quite different repertoires of knowledge and understanding, skills
and competences, attitudes and dispositions. Just about the only common feature of
flourishing lives is that they are self-determined: they have all been autonomously chosen by
those who live them. This may supply a warrant for installing autonomy as a basic aim of
education, but autonomy is not the same thing as flourishing and its contribution to
flourishing is not the only reason to value it. As Carr points out, educational theorists have
long defended autonomy as an educational aim without any invocation of the ideal of
flourishing:

Of course, one might still say that if one needs to be self-determined or autonomous in order
to flourish, then educationalists should encourage such self-determination: but this is to add
little if anything to past (liberal and other) philosophical and psychological conceptions of
education in which such emphasis has been well to the fore. (pp.394-5)

Carr does not deny that the ideal of flourishing has its uses. But he thinks it is useful
principally as a tool of ‘personal accountancy’, a yardstick we pull out from time to time ‘to
review our progress in life’ (p.395). When we pause to take stock, we may judge ourselves to
be excessively or insufficiently ambitious at work, to be devoting too much or too little of our
time to leisure activities, to be overly preoccupied with or inadequately attentive to our
romantic partners; and we may decide to make adjustments in our lives to address these
impediments to our flourishing. But such judgments and decisions, says Carr, are ‘inevitably
contestable and controversial’, are relative to our individual circumstances, preferences and
aspirations, and are framed by ‘the hopeless particularity and contingency of all possible
human trajectories for faring well’ (p.395). No matter how valuable its contribution to our
personal accounting, then, ‘it is hard to see what might be illuminated or gained regarding
education, curriculum development, or pedagogy by according serious theoretical
significance to the notion of flourishing’ (p.395).

4
Together, the missing argument and vacuity objections show that defenders of flourishing as
an educational aim still have a good deal of work to do. But there is another, more basic,
objection that seems to me to render their project more or less hopeless.

The unlearnability objection

The concepts of education, curriculum and teaching are all logically tethered to the concept
of learning. Education is going on, observes John Wilson, when ‘human learning above the
natural level is being deliberately promoted in accordance with some general or overall
policy’ (Wilson, 1979, p.33). A curriculum, notes Paul Hirst, is ‘a programme of activities
designed so that pupils will attain by learning certain specifiable ends or objectives’ (Hirst,
1974, p.2). And ‘because of the tightest conceptual connection’, Hirst continues, ‘the
characterisation and raison d’etre of teaching rests on that of learning’ (Hirst, 1974, p.105). I
rehearse these familiar and, I hope, uncontroversial conceptual points because they appear to
have been largely overlooked by flourishing enthusiasts.

A desirable attribute, quality or state can only be adopted as an aim of education if it is the
sort of attribute, quality or state that can be acquired by learning. Being tall may be a
desirable attribute, at least to the extent that tall people enjoy certain social and economic
advantages over short people; but it cannot be an aim of education because height is not
something that can be learned. The same goes for being rich, or famous, or beautiful, or
talented. Whether such states and qualities are desirable is a matter we can sensibly debate,
but it is clear than none can serve as an aim of education because none can be acquired by
learning.

By contrast, being literate, numerate, fluent in French or skilled in reasoning are candidates
for consideration as educational aims because they are attributes that can be learned. An
attribute is learnable when a person can acquire it ‘by paying some kind of attention, or
making some kind of conscious attempt on the world’ (Wilson, 1979, p.75). It is by making
conscious attempts on the world, with the support and guidance of parents and teachers, that
children become numerate, literate, fluent in French and skilled in reasoning. Again, there is
room for discussion about whether these are things educators should aim at: John White, at
least, is doubtful that modern foreign languages deserve their place among the foundation
subjects in the National Curriculum for England (White, 1990, pp.127-128). But it is beyond
dispute that they are things educators could aim at, because they belong to the class of
attributes, qualities and states that can be acquired by learning.

The unlearnability objection to flourishing as an educational aim is this: on any plausible

account of human flourishing, it is not a state of being that can be acquired by learning. To be
sure, some of the necessary conditions of flourishing – most obviously, perhaps, a range of
moral, intellectual and executive virtues – are the sorts of thing that can be learned. But, to
my knowledge, no theorist of flourishing has maintained that a full set of virtues, or any other
combination of learnable attributes, is sufficient. The necessary conditions of flourishing
include a battery of genetic, environmental, social and political goods that most certainly are
not the sorts of thing that can be learned. To say of a person that she is flourishing is to say
something not just about the character she has acquired, but also about the constitution she is
blessed with and the circumstances in which she finds herself.

5
Kristjansson refers to these constitutional and circumstantial goods as ‘external necessities’
and emphasises their centrality to any conception of flourishing that ‘is meant to draw in any
way upon Aristotle’s original account of eudaimonia’ (Kristjansson, 2020, p.34). He goes on
to enumerate six categories of external necessities:

What are those resources or goods of fortune that we need to stand a chance of flourishing?
Aristotle provides extended lists of them, but I will only briefly mention six categories. (1)
Close parental attachment and good upbringing/ education… (2) Good government, ruling
in the interests of the people, and a just constitution. Aristotle thus politicises the good life
explicitly and even warns specifically against the dangers of excessive inequalities… (3)
Enough wealth to make sure we do not come a cropper. Aristotle has no time for
idealisations of happy-go-lucky poverty; rather, he thinks it dissipates and degrades. (4) A
complete life: namely, a life in which we do not die prematurely… (5) Health, strength and
even minimal physical beauty. The last element may seem anachronistic, but think of the
frequent shaming and bullying of fat or ugly people on today’s social media, and you get
Aristotle’s point… (6) Friends and family. Aristotle thinks we need those, inter alia, in order
to hone and display our virtues. (p.35)

No matter what she has learned in school or at home, a person is not flourishing if she lives in
abject poverty, if she is in continuous pain, if she has endured the untimely loss of those she
holds dear, if she suffers daily discrimination because of her ethnicity or religion. This is not
to deny that societies can and should take meaningful steps to eliminate poverty, relieve pain,
reduce untimely bereavement and stamp out discrimination. But the steps they can take are
not, or not primarily, educational ones, and nothing an individual learns can innoculate her
against the misfortunes that prevent flourishing.

Consider Kristjansson’s second category of external necessities: good government, ruling in

the interests of the people, and a just constitution. For those who live under repressive or
totalitarian regimes, who are denied basic rights and liberties, whose governments disregard
their interests in safety, sanitation and access to utilities, it is impossible to live a flourishing
life. Even when the failings of a political system are less extreme – when, say, the institutions
of liberal democracy are in place but welfare provision is minimal and the gap between rich
and poor is very wide – citizens on lower incomes have little prospect of flourishing. Insofar
as people cannot flourish because they are badly governed, attempts to make them more
knowledgeable, skilful or virtuous are rather beside the point.

Or again, consider the fifth category: health, strength and minimal physical beauty. There are
any number of chronic, debilitating, degenerative and terminal medical conditions that
effectively preclude flourishing and against which programmes of health education afford
little or no protection. Teaching children to make healthy choices is certainly worthwhile, but
tackling the genetic and environmental causes of the diseases and impairments that blight so
many lives is a task to which educators have only a modest contribution to make. The most
serious threats to our health and strength are not ones we can avert by means of learning.

Education, then, cannot deliver the constitutional and circumstantial goods necessary for
human flourishing. It is no doubt true that flourishing people require certain kinds of
knowledge, skill and virtue; but they also need to be well-brought-up, justly governed,
comfortably off, long-lived, healthy and strong, and supported by friends and family. Because
educators can help only with goods of the learnable kind, flourishing cannot serve as an aim
of education.

6
Two responses to the unlearnability objection

The unlearnability objection seems to me to be decisive. But flourishing enthusiasts

determined to resist it have two argumentative strategies available to them. The first is to
stretch the concept of education so as to include the pursuit of more goods than the goods of
learning. If education is untethered from learning, the logical constraint on the range of goods
educators can intelligibly pursue is removed.

This is the strategy deployed by Kristjansson. Berating White for his concession that some
necessary conditions of flourishing are ‘beyond the school’s control’ (White, 2011, p.30),
Kristjansson proposes that teachers should not ‘bow down to the force of adverse external
circumstances’, but should rather ‘take up arms on students’ behalf’ (Kristjansson, 2020,
p.39). Educators should understand themselves not just as facilitators of learning, but also as
social activists:

… given how flourishing requires a larger set of enabling conditions than does good
character… and also given the natural role of teachers as spokespersons for the rights and
interests of the children they teach, taking on the role of a flourishing educator places heavy
politico-moral demands on teachers as activists and agents of societal change. (pp.23-24)

On Kristjansson’s view, insofar as teachers are serious about enabling children to flourish,
they have no choice but to attend to ‘the first precondition of flourishing’ (p.33) – the
external necessities. As he puts it: ‘Any viable theory drawing on an Aristotelian conception
of flourishing will, arguably, call for a more active political contribution from teachers and
other educational agents in order to make sure that the first precondition of student
flourishing is universally met’ (p.40).

Kristjansson acknowledges that this will be onerous for teachers. It will certainly ‘pile further
moral pressure on an already overburdened profession’ (p.39). Indeed, the magnitude of the
task of ensuring that all children have what they need to flourish threatens to ‘turn teaching
into a forlorn profession’ (p.40). But Kristjansson is undeterred: ‘better to be forlorn’, he
insists, ‘than morally disengaged and aloof’.

‘Forlorn’, though, hardly begins to cover it. Going by Kristjansson’s own list of external
necessities, teachers are now charged with bringing it about that children are well-brought-up,
justly governed, comfortably off, long-lived, healthy and strong, and supported by friends and
family. Delivering these goods requires them to be agents not only of social and political
change but also of genetic and environmental change. They must take on the work of parents
and carers, policy-makers and reformers, economists and entrepreneurs, scientists and
environmentalists, medical researchers and healthcare workers. Fairly obviously, expanding
the remit of teachers so drastically does not just put further pressure on an overburdened
profession: it makes the job quite impossible.

Perhaps Kristjansson has a more modest expansion in mind. The problem is that, once the
conceptual tie between education and learning is severed, and once the implications of the
requirement ‘to make sure that the first precondition of student flourishing is universally met’
are spelled out, it is hard to see what could curb the expansion. Kristjansson does not trouble
to draw the parameters of his revised concept of education, but we may suppose that he
understands it, roughly, as the practice of bringing it about that children flourish. And it would

7
seem to follow that teachers must take responsibility for furnishing children with the full set
of external necessities.

I think this amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of the first response to the unlearnability
objection. Stretching the concept of education to include the pursuit of unlearnable as well as
learnable goods, and thereby to accommodate flourishing as an educational aim, makes such
overwhelming demands on teachers as to be self-evidently unworkable.

The second response to the unlearnability objection is to stretch the concept of aims so as to
include not only goods pursued by those engaged in an activity, but also wider ends furthered
by the achievement of such goods. This is the strategy adopted by de Ruyter:

… it might be argued that well-being cannot be an aim of education because well-being is

not something that can be achieved as a goal… However, well-being could still be regarded
as an aim, depending on how one defines an ‘aim of education’. If it refers to the final
answer in the justification of why one educates children and why education has the content it
has, then well-being can be regarded as an aim of education. The acquisition of knowledge,
capacities and dispositions are indeed what parents and teachers pursue, but if they are asked
why, they can say that they do so to further children’s well-being. (de Ruyter, 2015, p.86)

On de Ruyter’s expanded conception, when we talk of educational aims, we are not referring
only to the goals teachers are trying to achieve by the educational means available to them.
We are referring also to the wider set of ends invoked to justify those goals. So, while
flourishing is not something that can be achieved by educational means, it may enter into the
justification offered for teaching, say, the moral, intellectual and executive virtues. At first
sight, perhaps, this move looks innocent enough. But, on closer inspection, it is a recipe for
serious confusion.

As R.S. Peters pointed out some time ago, stretching the concept of aims in the way de
Ruyter favours represents a significant departure from ordinary usage:

The term ‘aim’ has its natural home in the context of limited and circumscribed activities
like shooting and throwing. ‘Aiming’ is associated with the concentration of attention within
such an activity on some object which must be hit, or pierced. Its internal accusative ‘target’
covers anything conforming to this specification. When the term ‘aim’ is used more
figuratively it has the same suggestion of the concentration of attention on something which
is the focus of an activity. It is odd to use it… to suggest some explanatory end for the
activity in question. (Peters, 1966, pp.27-28)

It is one thing to investigate the focus of an activity, quite another to seek an explanation
or justification of that focus. Using the word ‘aim’ for the object of both kinds of
inquiry unhelpfully blurs this distinction. It conflates the question of what educators
should be doing with the question of why they should be doing it. And this has a number
of undesirable effects.

First, teachers need a clear and shared understanding of what it is they are trying to
achieve, of the outcomes on which their attention is concentrated. They need a firm
handle on what knowledge and understanding, what skills, attitudes and dispositions,
they are seeking to cultivate in the children they teach. If, by muddying the ordinary
concept of aims, we make it harder for teachers to distinguish the learnable goods they
are in a position to deliver from the wider ends furthered by those goods, we reduce

8
their prospects of coming to a clear and shared understanding and increase their
susceptibility to unrealistic expectations and professional disappointment.

Second, governments, parents and the public at large quite properly hold schools to
account for providing an educational service. And the natural way to assess the
performance of schools is to measure their achievements against their aims. But if their
aims include a wider assortment of ends than the goods of learning, both the difficulty
of assessing their performance and the risk of their being unfairly judged inadequate are
greatly amplified. The achievements of schools will always and necessarily fall short of
their aims if their aims cannot realised by educational means. Schools ought to be able
to bring it about that all, or almost all, pupils are literate and numerate, and special
measures are rightly put in place when they fail to do that. But schools are manifestly
not equipped to bring it about that all, or almost all, pupils flourish, and there are no
special measures that could remedy the problem. Lumping learnable goods like literacy
and numeracy together with wider ends like flourishing unnecessarily complicates the
business of holding schools to account.

And third, educational policy-makers in a democratic society must secure broad

consensus on the goods of learning schools are tasked with delivering. If schools are to
be politically legitimate, and to enjoy the support of the communities they serve, there
must be general agreement among citizens on what they are trying to achieve. There
must, that is to say, be agreement on the aims of public education, in the ordinary sense
of ‘aims’. But there need not be agreement on the justification of those aims – and in a
plural society, where citizens care about different things and endorse different
conceptions of the good, such agreement will be hard to come by. Some citizens will
value the goods of learning for their contribution to human flourishing, but others will
value them for their contribution to a just society, or to a strong economy, or to some
form of salvation or liberation. Others will hold that the goods of learning have intrinsic
value and require no justification beyond themselves. And others still will insist that the
liberal state has no mandate to ‘perfect’ the lives of citizens, so what is taught in schools
must be justified without reference to an ideal of the good human life. Because policy-
makers have a fighting chance of securing consensus on what schools are trying to
achieve, and almost no chance of securing consensus on why, obscuring the distinction
between the two is highly counterproductive.

For these reasons, the second response to the unlearnability objection should also be rejected.
The practical difficulties caused by stretching the concept of aims, while perhaps not as acute
as those caused by stretching the concept of education, are certainly severe enough to
discredit the strategy. And once these two options have been closed off, it is not clear what
other moves are available to those minded to resist the unlearnability objection. Given the
ordinary senses of ‘education’ and ‘aims’, the fact that educators cannot deliver the
constitutional and circumstantial goods necessary for flourishing rules out the possibility of
counting flourishing among the aims of education.

A final thought. I have focused on what I take to be the particular problems with amending
the concepts of education and aims in the ways proposed by Kristjansson and de Ruyter. But,
these problems aside, I think there is a more general reason to be wary of concept-stretching
strategies deployed in attempts to answer well-formed educational questions. Education,
understood as the deliberate promotion of human learning in accordance with an overall
policy, is, in fact, a central feature of children’s lives and a major area of public spending in

9
every country in the world. Practitioners of education are, in fact, guided by aims, understood
as things they are trying to achieve or goals on which their attention is concentrated. What
exactly these aims should be is therefore a question of the first importance and one with
which educational theorists have long been, and continue to be, preoccupied. The question is
a difficult one, but it is not confused, incoherent or poorly formed. The difficulty lies
principally in the superabundance of learnable goods that could be selected as aims of
education and the scope for reasonable disagreement about which should make the cut. A
basic requirement of any serious contribution to this debate is that it respects the terms of the
question. The general reason we have for being wary of concept-stretching strategies, at least
with respect to well-formed educational questions, is that they do not show this respect. They
amend the terms of the question in order to fit it, Procrustes-like, to a favoured answer. Those
who begin by asking what the aims of education should be and end by defending answers that
require adjustments to what is meant by ‘education’ or ‘aims’ are, to that extent, changing the
subject.

References

Brighouse, H. (2006) On Education, London: Routledge.

Brighouse, H., Ladd, H.F., Loeb, S. and Swift, A. (2018) Educational Goods: Values,
Evidence and Decision Making, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Carr, D. (2021) ‘Where’s the educational virtue in flourishing?’, Educational Theory 71 (3),
pp.389-407.

Curren R (2012) ‘Education and the human good’, Proceedings of the 22nd German
Congress of Philosophy, http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/12619/ (accessed 14/6/22).

Curren, R. (2013) ‘A neo-Aristotelian account of education, justice, and the human good’,
Theory and Research in Education 11 (3), pp.231-249.

de Ruyter, D.J. (2004) ‘Pottering in the garden? On human flourishing and education’,
British
Journal of Educational Studies 52 (4), pp.377-389.

de Ruyter, D. J. (2015) ‘Well-being and education’, in J. Suissa, C. Winstanley and R.

Marples (eds) Education, Philosophy and Well-being: New Perspectives on the Work of John
White, London: Routledge, pp.84-98.

Hand, M. (2018) A Theory of Moral Education, London: Routledge.

Hirst, P.H. (1974) Knowledge and the Curriculum, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Kristjánsson, K. (2016) ‘Flourishing as the aim of education: towards an extended,

‘enchanted’ Aristotelian account’, Oxford Review of Education 42 (6), pp.707-720.

10
Kristjánsson, K. (2017) ‘Recent work on flourishing as the aim of education: a critical
review’, British Journal of Educational Studies 65 (1), pp.87-107.

Kristjánsson, K. (2020) Flourishing as the Aim of Education: A Neo-Aristotelian View,

London: Routledge.

Reiss, M.J. and White, J. (2013) An Aims-based Curriculum: The Significance of Human
Flourishing for Schools, London: Institute of Education Press.

Siegel, H. (2023) ‘Education’s aims’, in J. Beale and C. Easton (eds) The Future of
Education: Reimagining its Aims and Responsibilities, Oxford: OUP.

White, J. (1990) Education and the Good Life: Beyond the National Curriculum, London:
Kogan Page.

White, J. (2011) Exploring Well-being in Schools: A Guide to Making Children’s Lives More
Fulfilling, London: Routledge.

Wilson, J. (1979) Preface to the Philosophy of Education, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Wolbert, L.S., de Ruyter, D.J. and Schinkel, A. (2015) ‘Formal criteria for the concept of
human flourishing: the first steps in defending flourishing as an ideal aim of education’,
Ethics and Education 10 (1), pp.118-129.

11