Studying Education

1 1
Studying Education
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018

S. Kemmis and C. Edwards-Groves, Understanding Education, Springer Texts in Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6433-3_1
2 Chapter 1 · Studying Education
Education has a double purpose.1 On the one hand, it aims

1 to form and develop individuals with the knowledge, capa-
bilities and character to live good lives—that is, lives com-
mitted to the good for humankind. On the other hand,
education aims to form and develop good societies, in which
the good for humankind is the principal value.2,3
The double purpose In times long past, this double purpose was more read-
of education: the ily seen and understood than it is today. When lives were
educated person and lived in smaller social groupings, individuals developed their
the good society knowledge, capability and character in face-to-face relation-
ships with others, so the good of each could more readily be
understood in relation to the good for all. A boy might learn
to hunt, for instance, following the example of older men
to learn and develop the skills they demonstrated, and thus
contribute by his success to feeding his family or village.4 In
those long-distant times, the patterns of life in a nomadic
clan or village were relatively clear, known to all at least in
outline, though specialised skills and occupations might be
mastered only by only a few in the group. With the develop-
ment of agriculture and larger settlements of people, the dif-
ferentiation of the patterns of life and activity became more
marked, along with new differentiations of skills and social
differentiations between people fulfilling different roles and
specialisms.
Social differentiation: Later social formations, like the city-state and the nation-
the technical and the state, pushed differentiation still further, both in terms of
social division of labour the technical division of labour and the corresponding
1 Throughout this book, we have used footnotes to elaborate par-

ticular points, to invite you to think further about particular issues,
and to clarify ideas. The footnotes are thus in a kind of conversation
with the main text.
2 The discussion of the double, individual and social, purpose of
education runs back through Dewey to the ancients, like Plato
(424/423–348/347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC) in Ancient
Greece. Dewey’s (1916) Democracy and education is a classical state-
ment of the view.
3 The social nature of individual identity is not always clear in
contemporary discussions of society, particularly by those whose
view of society is based on ‘atomistic individualism’. This is the view
expressed in former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s
proclamation that there is no society, only individuals. For an elo-
quent critique of this view, see Taylor (1991).
4 The image of learning and education in traditional societies as
suggesting a model for understanding education as a process of
social and cultural reproduction can be found in a range of texts on
education. Lundgren (1983) and Hamilton (1990) are two examples.
Studying Education
3 1
social division of labour.5 Differentiation further increased
through the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), when new
forms of manufacturing emerged, particularly through the
use of steam engines. At this time, thousands of agricultural
workers left the countryside to seek work in the industrial
cities, so a wave of urbanisation accompanied industriali-
sation.6 In our contemporary times, differentiation in the
technical division of labour and the corresponding differen-
tiation in the social division of labour have progressed to a
point at which the core patterns of social life, that is, the pat-
terns of human activity necessary for individual and group
survival, are enmeshed in immeasurably complex ways,
frequently competing, colliding with and contradicting one
another.7 In our post-industrial, globalised society, no one
sees and understands the whole of this web. Thus, how edu-
cation can achieve its purpose seems unclear. If no one can
see and understand the whole, how can individual learners
and teachers be formed and developed to contribute to the
good of all—to the good for all humankind?
Faced with the immense complexity of world society, Social complexity: a
including the immeasurable diversity and complexity of challenge for education
world cultural-linguistic, material-economic and social-
political interrelationships, reference to simpler times might
seem an unpromising beginning for a discussion about the
nature of education. Simple models may be more likely
to deceive us than to illuminate the nature and process of
5 A technical division of labour is a division between tasks (like

the division between managing a school and teaching a class,
or between cooking and cleaning). A social division of labour is
a division between categories of people based on what they do
(like being a school principal and being a teacher in the school, or
between being a chef and being a cleaner).
6 Several books of Foucault (for example, 1970, 1977, 1979, 1980,
1988; for an introduction and commentary, see Ball 1990) show the
rise of new institutions to cope with the masses of people in cities
as urbanisation and industrialisation progressed—workhouses, the
police, prisons, and hospitals, to name a few.
7 In his book After virtue, MacIntyre (1981) described the conse-
quences of this differentiation and fragmentation for the morality
of the present. MacIntyre argues that we are now prisoners of
bureaucratic forms of life that arose in the nineteenth century,
and became dominant in the twentieth, to the point where we are
no longer principally guided by the moral and intellectual virtues
prized by the ancient Greeks and Romans.
education for the twenty-first century.8 Against this view,

1 however, we hope to show that, despite the complexity, we
can understand the double task of education in the contem-
porary world and that educators can pursue this double pur-
pose with the aim of contributing to the formation of better
people and a better world.
Education, uncertainty Restoring the sense of purpose of education is an urgent
and survival task, not simply in order to recover a sense of its significance
for educators, aptly described by former President of the
New South Wales Teachers’ Federation and Federal President
of the Australian Education Union, Denis Fitzgerald, as ‘the
most dignified of professions’. It is made urgent and impor-
tant in the face of the increased range of threats to human
survival—threats that confront individuals, societies and the
future of life on our planet. The great contemporary chal-
lenge is sustainability9: the sustainability of knowledge and
cultures in and for a globalised world, the sustainability of
the world environment, the sustainability of production and
consumption in local economies and the global economy,
and the sustainability of world society and global politics.
Measured against these criteria of sustainability, the conse-
quences of human action and inaction are increasingly grave.
Social consequences, The finitude of the earth’s resources is a challenge that
unequally shared confronts us all, but the costs of failing to ensure the sus-
tainability of life on the planet are already unequally shared.
These costs are already rising more sharply for some kinds
of people, cultures, societies and species. At the same time,
the rewards of some patterns of life and some patterns of
use of the world’s resources are rising correspondingly for
some kinds of people, cultures, societies and species—at the
expense of others. And those who currently benefit from
the current arrangements are far fewer than those who bear
the costs, within and between cultures, societies and spe-
cies. The foreseeable consequence of these arrangements is
conflict, civil strife and war, whose costs will be measured in
unequally shared human suffering and the unequally shared
8 For the classical postmodernist challenge to the idea of progress

and the aspirations for a coherent narrative of history and progress
through science, see Lyotard (1984). For eloquent responses to
postmodernist challenges to the notion that rationality offers no
substantial promise for human progress, see Habermas (1987)
and Benhabib (1992, especially the chapter ‘Feminisms and the
Question of Postmodernism’).
9 On sustainable development, see, for example, Black (2004).
Studying Education
5 1
disfigurement, shortening and loss of human lives, as well as
the loss of unprecedented numbers of species.
It is not clear what should be done about this, in terms Positive and negative
of what forms of life and human activity should prevail over views of pursuing the
what others. Indeed, it seems that wherever belief in one good
‘right’ way of being gains ascendancy among some group
who then begin to impose it on others, suffering ensues.10
Rather than following the promise of false-positive claims
about the good life for humankind, it might be more appro-
priate to look more closely at the causes of human mis-
ery, ill-health, suffering and injustice11—to work against
what is clearly and materially bad for humankind rather
than for what seems good for humankind. Seen in this way,
the double purpose of education would be to work against
human ignorance and social injustice and their conse-
quences rather than for some particular view of what kinds
of people, knowledge, communities and cultures are of most
worth. This is to ask for a form of education that respects
basic human rights and values like commitments to equity,
respect for difference and compassion. More generally, it is
to ask for a form of education marked by its commitment to
care12 for individuals and society, rather than a form of edu-
cation aimed solely at breeding success either for particular
individuals or for particular societies.
On this view, Education Studies13 as a field of study is Education Studies as a
not principally a technical activity aiming to equip individu- technical, practical and
als with the knowledge, capabilities and values necessary for critical activity
being a teacher. More fully understood, Education Studies is
a practical activity of informing educators so they can make
10 On the ill effects of the excesses of neo-liberalism, see Sennett

(1998) The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work
in the new capitalism.
11 This ‘negative’ approach derives from the view that understand-
ing justice might more readily be approached by the study of the
nature of injustice, as suggested by Young (1990) in her argument
that injustice is of two main kinds—domination, the unreasonable
constraint on self-determination, and oppression, the unreasonable
constraint on self-expression and self-development.
12 A classic argument about the role of care in education is presented
in Noddings (1992) The challenge to care: An alternative approach to
education.
13 The field that is called ‘Education Studies’ in much of the English-
speaking world is known in Europe as Pedagogy (or Pedagogik in
Swedish, or Pädagogik in German, for example). (In current usage
in English, ‘pedagogy’ is roughly synonymous with ‘teaching’ or
‘the art of teaching.’) The European field of Pedagogy explores the
wise and prudent judgements about what they should do at

1 any time, in relation to the educational arrangements and the
cultural, economic and political circumstances in which they
find themselves. As we understand it, Education Studies is
also a critical activity of analysing how existing educational
arrangements have come into being, and exploring whether,
as it turns out, the consequences of existing educational
arrangements are untoward, in the sense that they are unrea-
sonable, unproductive, unsustainable or unjust. On the basis
of such analyses and explorations, the critical approach to
Educational Studies aims to equip educators and others with
the knowledge, skills and values, individually and collectively
(as a profession), to transform educational arrangements to
avoid or overcome such untoward consequences and thus to
contribute to achieving the double purpose of education for
changing times and circumstances.14
Education in Antiquity: Aristotle

on Education
Ideas of the good are Since antiquity, education has aimed to form each person so
always historically they could live well, in the knowledge that what it means to
located live well is always shaped by a notion of what a good soci-
ety is like. But every notion of the good for each person and
the good for humankind is always historically located in the
particulars of a society in its time and place. In the Athens
of Plato (428/427–348/347 BCE15) and Aristotle (384–322
BCE), for example, the polis consisted of aristocratic men (it
excluded women and slaves) who were the heads of house-
holds. The Greek polis means ‘the city’ (or, we might say, the
Footnote 13 (continued)
nature of education, and its purposes. It is supplemented by its
subfield Didactics, which covers particular ways of doing educa-
tion, for example in subject didactics, like mathematics education or
geography education or science education. Like Education Studies,
Pedagogy in Europe covers many fields concerning the upbringing
of children and adults in many different settings, like youth work or
outdoor education, as well as education in institutional settings like
primary and secondary schools, early childhood education, adult
and vocational education, and higher education.
14 On technical, practical and critical views of knowledge see
Habermas (1972, 1974), Carr and Kemmis (1986), and Carr (1998).
15 BCE = Before the Christian Era.
Education in Antiquity: Aristotle on Education
7 1
city-state)—the community of citizens who, through their
law making, collectively chose how life for all was to be
ordered. These citizens chose how the life of the community
was to be ordered—largely in their own interests. In contem-
porary liberal democracies, the polis of adult citizens elect
representatives who form what the ancient Greeks would
have called a politeia16 (a government, a constitutional body)
also choose, by their law making, how life is to be ordered in
the interests of all (both those who participate in the mak-
ing of laws and those who do not). In today’s society, as in
ancient Athens, however, it is our view that education still
has the same double purpose: it aims to form people so they
can live well in a world worth living in.
From this, it follows that education is a normative17 pro-
cess in two senses: not only is education a process that is
guided by values (it is value-laden), it also initiates people
into norms and values.
Since antiquity, the practice of education in the West has Aristotle and the good:
always been a normative endeavour of one kind or another. happiness and the
Depending on its location in history and the world, it has virtues
always been directed towards some particular notion of the
good for each person that is reciprocally connected with a
corresponding notion of the good for humankind. Philoso-
phers have given different answers, for their different times,
to the questions ‘What is the good for a person?’ and ‘What
is the good for humankind?’ Plato gave one answer in his
The Republic (trans. 2003), favouring a republic ruled by phi-
losopher-kings. Aristotle gave another answer in The Nico-
machean Ethics (trans. Bartlett and Collins 2011) and the
16 Bartlett and Collins (2011, p. 318) translate politeia as ‘regime’;

Sinclair (1962, p. 21) preferred ‘constitution’ or ‘code of law’. Bartlett
and Collins (2011, p. 318) translate polis as ‘city’ (as in ‘the city-state’,
the city that governs itself by its own laws).
17 To say that education is ‘normative’ is to say that it is guided by
particular values, that it is value-laden and in some way prescrip-
tive. Saying that education is normative is to assert that education
is not, as some might wish, a value-free or merely technical activity
(for example, of transmitting value-free knowledge or skills). In our
view, education is always guided by values, whether those values
are explicit, unnoticed, invisible or actively concealed.
Politics (trans. Sinclair 1962), favouring a democratic society

1 in which people live nobly, pursuing the moral and intellec-
tual virtues.18
In his Nicomachean Ethics,19 Aristotle argues that the
good to which all things tend is happiness and that when it
comes to making choices about what to do in any practical
situation, which is to make a choice about how to live our
lives, we must choose and act in accordance with the eleven
moral virtues20 as well as the five intellectual virtues of art,
science, prudence (phronēsis), wisdom and intellect (nous).
Famously, Aristotle argues that one does not teach the moral
virtues, and people do not learn them through a program
18 By contrast, Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), for example, took

a more modern ‘humanist’ view of education (as represented,
for example in Woodward’s (1904) study Desiderius Erasmus
Concerning the Aim and Method of Education). John Amos Comenius
(1592–1670), who, like Erasmus, contends for the title of ‘the father
of modern education’, was an advocate for universal education;
his Didactica Magna (1633–1638) set out his views. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712–1778) described his view of education as the
development of young people from earliest childhood, based on
the idea that children are innately good, in his book Emile, or On
Education (1762). John Dewey (1859–1952) made many contribu-
tions to progressive views of education as the process of forming
liberal individuals to participate in a liberal democratic society
(including the society of the school), for example in his book
Democracy and Education (first published in 1916).
19 Like other texts of Aristotle and other ancient philosophers, the
Nicomachean Ethics (thought to have been dictated by Aristotle
and written down by his son Nicomachus) was probably written
in the form of aids to memory or ‘lecture notes’ which guided
Aristotle’s teaching of the young men who gathered around him.
Later, others acquired copies of these notes, and re-copied them—
not always faithfully. In ancient times, books were regarded as
scarce and exceptionally valuable.
20 The moral virtues, all except one of which, in Aristotle’s view, are
‘means’ (averages) that steer between ‘extremes’ of excess and
insufficiency, are: courage (acting in a way that accords with the
‘mean’ that steers between the excess of recklessness and the
insufficiency of cowardice), moderation (between the extremes of
licentiousness and ‘insensibility’), liberality (between prodigality
and stinginess), magnificence (between vulgarity and parsimony),
greatness of soul (between vanity and smallness of soul), ambition
(between an excess of ambition and lack of ambition), gentleness
(between irascibility and ‘unirascibility’), truthfulness (between
boastfulness and irony), wittiness and tact (between buffoonery
and crudity, and boorishness and dourness), friendliness (between
obsequiousness or flattery, and surliness and quarrelsomeness) and
justice (which is a mean without extremes, but whose opposite is
injustice) (after Bartlett and Collins 2011, pp. 303–4).
9 1
of education; rather, he says, we come to act in accordance
with the moral virtues by habituation—by acting and being
corrected, by striving to act well (and nobly) and by learn-
ing from the consequences of our actions. The point of phi-
losophy, ethics and political theory, nevertheless, is to show
us what ‘living well’ means (what Aristotle does by teach-
ing about the virtues in the Ethics) and what kind of polis
is worth living in (by his teachings about different kinds of
political arrangements in the Politics).
Aristotle does not aim only to show us what virtue The aim: to become
means, however; he also wants to teach us how to live a vir- good by acting
tuous life. About the purpose of his investigations in the according to reason
Nicomachean Ethics, he says, ‘we are conducting an examina-
tion, not so we may know what virtue is, but so that we may
become good’ (Bartlett and Collins 2011, p. 27). We learn
about the good not simply to know what good is, but to be
good. To know what virtue means may be a worthy matter
for contemplation (the activity that Aristotle regarded as the
best form of human life—the form of life of the philosopher),
but to become good, in Aristotle’s view, is to choose to live in
accordance with reason, which is to say ‘in accordance with
nature’ (where ‘nature’ here means the rationality by which
the cosmos is ordered21) because ‘what accords with nature
is naturally in the noblest possible state’ (Bartlett and Col-
lins 2011, p. 17). Moreover, Aristotle says, ‘it exercises a very
great care to make the citizens of a specific sort—namely
good and apt to do the noble things’ (Bartlett and Collins
2011, p. 18).
In Book III, Chap. 2 of the Ethics, Aristotle makes some The theoretical, the
important distinctions that have proved extremely impor- technical and the
tant in the history of Western thought about different kinds practical: theoria and
epistēmē, technē and
poiēsis, and praxis and
phronēsis
21 Note that by ‘the rationality of the cosmos’, we do not mean, and
Aristotle did not mean, a deity. In their interpretive essay on the
Ethics, Bartlett and Collins (2011, p. 261) note that Aristotle did
not include piety among the moral virtues, and they note (pp.
298–302) that his references to gods and the divine are surely
insincere, merely intended to placate readers or hearers who might
otherwise charge him, as Socrates was charged and condemned,
for corrupting the youth of Athens with his ideas and for impiety.
When Alexander of Macedon (Alexander the Great, Aristotle’s
former pupil) suspected Aristotle of conspiring against him, and
wrote letters threatening Aristotle, in 322 BCE Aristotle left Athens
for his mother’s estate at Chalcis, saying “I will not allow Athens to
sin against philosophy a second time”, a reference to the trial and
death of Socrates. He died in Euboea of natural causes in the same
year.
of action (for example, the distinction between the technical

1 and the practical already used in the Preface to this book). In
what might seem an unremarkable passage, he distinguishes
between contemplation (which is, for him, the noblest human
activity), on the one side, and what has come to be known
as practical action (and practical reason) and technical action
(and technical reason), on the other. This is the passage (Bart-
lett and Collins 2011, p. 47):
» [O]pinion is divided into false and true, not into bad and
good, whereas choice is divided more into these latter
two …. [I]t is by choosing the bad or good things that we
are of a certain sort [good or bad, noble or not noble],
not by opining about them …. Choice is … praised more
for being directed at what ought to be [acting well] or
for being correctly made [making things well], whereas
opinion is praised for how true it is.
For Aristotle, then, contemplation gives rise to opinions,

which are judged according to whether they are false or true.
The Greeks called the action of contemplation theoria—we
might call it theorising, or theoretical reasoning (the kind of
thing we are doing in much of this book). The telos or aim of
theoria is to gain knowledge or wisdom, captured in the dis-
position the Greeks called epistēmē.22
According to Aristotle (in the quotation above), choice,
by contrast, yields decisions about either ‘what ought to
be’ or whether things are ‘correctly made’. Regarding ‘what
ought to be’, he says, we are open to praise or blame depend-
ing on what action we choose to take in a particular histori-
cal moment, based on our practical reasoning (or practical
deliberation) about what to do in this particular uncertain
situation. The Greeks called this kind of action praxis (it is
whatever we do when we try to choose what it is best to do
under the circumstances). They said that praxis aims at the
telos or goal of prudence and is guided by the disposition
they called phronēsis, a disposition to act nobly and well in
the world. (We hope this book will assist you, as an educator,
to make wise decisions about what to do in your work and
life.)
Regarding what is ‘correctly made’, by contrast, we are
open to praise or blame depending on what making action
we choose to take in a particular situation, based on our
22 These distinctions are further elaborated and developed in Book VI

of the Ethics.
11 1
technical reasoning about, and our skills and capabilities
for, making something—a pot or a poem, for example. The
Greeks called this kind of action technē and saw it as aimed
towards the telos of craft knowledge, guided by the disposi-
tion the Greeks called poiēsis. (We hope this book will also
give you some kinds of assistance with the technicalities of
doing your work as a teacher, but it is not aimed at teach-
ing much in the way of techniques for teaching—instead, it
offers techniques for thinking about questions and issues in
Education Studies.)
Through praxis, we act consciously and deliberately to
form both ourselves and the world we share with others;
through technē, we make external objects—things.
In the Ethics, then, Aristotle teaches about the pursuit Becoming a eudaimon
of happiness—in ancient Greek, eudaimonia. The real hap-
piness of the eudaimon, the person who has achieved hap-
piness, is not pleasure or consumption—these are just
passing things. The happiness of the eudaimon is achieved
only through living a life of moral and intellectual virtue,
and thus a life that is noble not only for the one who lives it,
but also because it contributes to the good for humankind.
A person does not know, necessarily, whether she or he is
a eudaimon—perhaps even until the end of her or his life.
Only at the end of our lives, when we see the whole of our
lives in perspective, can we say whether we actually did live
nobly and well. This is a very different way of understand-
ing ourselves in the world compared with our contemporary
perspectives on life today, when someone might judge their
actions one by one, and think that if we generally do good
rather than harm, that is good enough. For the ancients, each
bad act was a stain on a person’s character, diminishing her
or his reputation. In some ways, a few centuries later, Chris-
tianity took up this notion in the idea of sin as a stain, but
Christianity also offers the idea of the forgiveness and wash-
ing away of sins. Aristocratic people in ancient Greece—
those with arête—held themselves to the highest standards
(though of course many also acted in quite contrary ways).
In general, however, they believed that a person who failed to
act nobly and in the interests of the good for humankind had
an indelible stain on their character, unless they righted the
wrong they had done. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
quoted the poet Agathon (Bartlett and Collins 2011, p. 117):
» For of this alone even a god is deprived:

To make undone whatever things have been done.
On this view, the aristocratic ancient Greeks strove to be the

1 best and most noble they could be in everything they did;
they were not satisfied just to do “as well as I could on the
day”.
The good for the In the Politics—which is the second part of the two-
person depends on the part investigation Aristotle began in the Ethics23—Aristotle
good for the society showed how the good for the individual depends on the kind
of political community in which the person lives, drawing on
an investigation of the constitutions of different kinds of states
(including monarchy, oligarchy and democracy). The good
for each person and the good of the city are both necessary
parts of the good for humankind, and they come together
in the form of political life to be lived in a city. In Book VII,
Chap. 13 of the Politics (Sinclair 1962, p. 284), he says:
» It is not in Fortune’s power to make a city good; that is
a matter of scientific planning and deliberate policy. On
the other hand, a city’s being good rests on the citizens
who share in the constitution being good; and for us
[Athenians, in Athenian democracy] all the citizens share
in the constitution.
For Aristotle, education is a crucial part of this ‘scientific

planning and deliberate policy’. In Book V, Chap. 9 of the
Politics (Sinclair 1962, pp. 215–6), he wrote:
» But of all the safeguards that we hear spoken of as
helping to maintain constitutional continuity the most
important, but most neglected today, is education, that
is educating citizens for the way of living that belongs
to the constitution in each case. It is useless to have
the most beneficial rules of society fully agreed upon
by all who are members of the politeia [constitutional
body], if individuals are not going to be trained and
have their habits formed for that politeia, that is to live
democratically if the laws of society are democratic,
oligarchically if they are oligarchic; for as one individual
may get out of hand for want of training, so may a
whole city. Now by education for a constitution I do not
mean simply teaching the young to do the things that
oligarchically-minded or democratically-minded people
enjoy doing, but that their teaching should enable them
to live as an oligarch in an oligarchy, as a democrat in a
democracy.
23 As indicated in the last chapter in the last book of the Nicomachean

Ethics, Book IX, Chap. 8, which is the transition to The Politics.
13 1
Here, again, Aristotle emphasises that education is not about
how to live but for living—to enable people to live as citizens
who participate in a politeia and a polis.
In Book VIII, Chap. 1 of the Politics, Aristotle is still Education must be a
more emphatic about the connection between education and public concern
the formation of the city-state. He writes (Sinclair 1962, pp.
299–300):
» No one would dispute the fact that it is a lawgiver’s
prime duty to arrange for the education of the young.
There is no doubt that where this is not done the quality
of the constitution suffers every time. Education must
be related to the particular constitution in each case,
for the character of the constitution is just that which
makes it specifically what it is. Its own character made it
at the start and continues to maintain it, the democratic
character preserves a democracy, the oligarchic an
oligarchy. And in all circumstances the best character
produces the best constitution. There must also be
the preparatory training for all the various crafts and
professions and a process of habituation to the various
jobs; so it is obvious that there must also be training for
the activities of virtue. But since there is but one aim for
the entire city, it follows that education must be one and
the same for all and that oversight of education must
be a public concern, not the private affair that it now is,
each man separately bringing up his own children and
teaching them just what he thinks they ought to learn.
In all matters that belong to the whole community the
learning to do them must also be the concern of the
community as a whole. And it is not right either that
any of the citizens should think that he belongs just to
himself; all citizens belong to the state, for each is part of
the state; and the care bestowed on each part naturally
looks also towards the care of the whole.
The constitutional community Aristotle has in mind is not Athenian democracy:

all of the people who live in the city, but just those who are the polis
citizens: free, aristocratic, adult men with households and
estates. It is easy to parody Aristotle’s democracy from our
vantage point two thousand years after Athenian democracy,
seeing it as unacceptably narrow and contemptuously exclu-
sive. Arendt (1958, pp. 26–7), however, reminds us just how
historically unprecedented was the central idea that came
into existence with the formation of Greek democracy: the
idea of what it meant to live in a polis—a city-state ruled

1 (democratically) by its citizens.
» To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything
was decided through words and persuasion, not through
force and violence. In Greek self-understanding, to force
people by violence, to command people rather than to
persuade, were prepolitical ways to deal with people
characteristic of life outside the polis, of home and family
life, where the household head ruled with uncontested,
despotic powers, or in the life of the barbarian empires
of Asia, whose despotism was frequently likened to the
organisation of the household.
Aristotle’s account of the moral and intellectual virtues in the

Ethics, then, gives us a picture of what he considered to be
the good life for a person, and this is complemented by the
picture he paints in the Politics, where he outlines his spe-
cific conception of the good life for humankind. He presents
us with a picture of a world in which citizens in a democ-
racy deliberate together and then decide the laws that will
govern their lives, and also of a world in which people act
nobly, according to the moral virtues, and for the good of the
human community.
Education Today
Conceptions of the For us, two and a half millennia later, at least one part of
good for the person Aristotle’s theory of education still holds true: the good life
and the good for for each person cannot be conceived or enacted without
humankind are some notion of the good for humankind, and the good for
interlinked humankind cannot be conceived or enacted without some
notion of the good life for a person. No matter what you
think ‘living well’ means, living well is not possible except
in a society worth living in, and no matter what you think ‘a
world worth living in’ means, a society worth living in can-
not be had without the efforts of people of goodwill to create
and secure such a society.
We encounter Some commentators argue (and we agree with them)
one another in that many people today appear to be unable to answer, for
three domains of our time, the questions of what it means to live well, and
intersubjectivity what sort of society is worth living in. The translators of a
new edition of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Bartlett and
Collins (2011, p. x), point to the radical relativism of some
postmodern thought when they say (ironically), ‘Everybody
now knows that nobody knows what the good life is’. They
Education Today
15 1
echo the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s view that
contemporary political life in the West is undermined by a
radical, ‘atomistic’ (1991, p. 9) individualism that orients us
to care for ourselves, primarily as consumers, but not to care
sufficiently for the social and political fabric that binds us
together in our lives and on the planet. In our view, this ego-
istic individualism dangerously undermines the three kinds
of intersubjective conditions and social media that make
democratic communities possible:
(1) In relation to semantic space and the medium of lan-
guage, atomistic individualism obscures the insight that
people can only comprehend one another and the world
through the resources of shared cultural-discursive
understandings. It is this language that gives them
the power to reason together about what ought to be
done and thus to preserve the various kinds of groups,
communities and organisations in which people live
together. Thus, also, language enables people to avert
the kinds of crises that can erupt when people’s lives
and commitments are unintelligible or seem unreason-
able to one another.
(2) In relation to physical space–time and the medium of
activity and work, atomistic individualism obscures the
insight that people’s individual and collective well-being
depend on our individual and collective access to mate-
rial-economic arrangements that create and preserve a
productive and sustainable economy and environment.
Activity and work provide people with access to an
interesting and satisfying life for all. Thus, also, activ-
ity and work avert the kinds of crises that erupt when
people endure suffering and when their material needs
remain unmet.
(3) In relation to social space and the medium of power and
solidarity, atomistic individualism obscures the insight
that the forms of life of just and democratic socie-
ties depend on our individual and collective access to
shared social-political arrangements that make pos-
sible the exercise of reason. In the media of power and
solidarity, people balance (or do not balance) their
individual and collective interests and thus avert the
crises produced by unresolved injustices of oppression
and domination.
Like Charles Taylor, then, we reject the notion that we can

understand persons entirely in terms of how they are as
individual human beings. Our existence as persons and our

1 co-existence with others as social beings depend on our
inhabiting intersubjective spaces that are not just ‘between’
human beings but also ‘within’ us—the part that is within
us that constitutes who we are, making us recognisable to
ourselves, and to others. We are not just flesh and bone and
bodies; we are also constituted as minds and capabilities and
emotions that depend not just on our physical, space–time
individuality as biological organisms but also on the cultural,
natural and social world we share with others. What makes
us comprehensible to ourselves, what we might call our sub-
jectivity, has its origins in intersubjectivity: the culture, nature
and society we share with others.
We meet one another, first, in language. The possibility
of reaching mutual understanding depends on our encoun-
tering one another in a language we share in common. Sec-
ond, we meet one another in physical space–time. We are
constituted and reconstituted as embodied beings in the
stuff of material physical space–time and we encounter one
another as material beings as we navigate through a shared
material reality. And, third, we meet one another in social
space. We are always in relationships with others: relation-
ships that engender emotions and values like care, com-
passion, belonging, identity, difference, love, hate, power
and solidarity. Even when we are alone, we are the product
of relationships; when we are with others, we are always in
substantive relationships that shape us in relation to one
another—as parent and child, as teacher and student, as lov-
ers, as helper and helped, or (less frequently than is generally
believed) as competitors with one another.
Like Charles Taylor, we believe that human beings are not
isolated social atoms; we are made and make ourselves, right
down to our very understanding of who we are, in these
three kinds of intersubjective spaces that we share with oth-
ers. We are not just physical or psychological beings; we are
cultural, natural and social beings. And that is what makes
us human beings.
Through our education, we become more and more
clearly aware of how we are constituted intersubjectively.
Through our education, we are initiated into forms of under-
standing in the shared medium of language, in semantic
space, in the cultural-discursive dimension of intersubjectiv-
ity. Second, through our education, we are initiated into
modes of action, in the shared medium of activity or work,
in physical space–time, in the material-economic dimension
of intersubjectivity. Third, through our education, we are
Education Today
17 1
initiated into ways of relating to one another and the world,
in the shared medium of power and solidarity, in social space,
in the social-political dimension of intersubjectivity.
This last point is a crucial hinge in our argument towards Individual and collective
a definition of education. We are convinced by the argu- self-expression, self-
ment put by Iris Marion Young in her (1990) book Justice development and
and the Politics of Difference that we can make more head- self-determination
way towards achieving justice in society not by focusing
principally on the positive ‘justice’ but rather by concentrat-
ing our efforts on avoiding or overcoming and ameliorating
the negative ‘injustice’. For Young, there are just two forms
of injustice: oppression and domination. She elaborates each
in her book. Oppression,24 she argues, occurs when social
structures and practices unreasonably limit people’s oppor-
tunities for individual or collective self-expression and self-
development; domination occurs when social structures and
practices unreasonably limit people’s opportunities for indi-
vidual or collective self-determination. A society that aims to
be just, then, must work against the injustices of oppression
and domination, that is, against structures and practices that
unreasonably limit people’s individual and collective powers
of self-expression, self-development and self-determination.
We think Young’s picture of a society working continuously
against injustice gives a possible answer, for our time, to the
question of what the good for humankind might look like: a
society that works both to overcome limits to, and to extend,
people’s individual and collective opportunities and capacities
for self-expression, self-development and self-determination in
ways compatible with the collective opportunities and capaci-
ties of all.
When she locates injustice in the particular dimensions
of (a) self-expression, (b) self-development and (c) self-
determination, it seems to us that Young may also have
drunk at the well of the philosophical tradition that gave
the ancients the ideas of learning to (a) speak and think well,
developed by the study of dialectics or logic; (b) act well in
the physical world, developed by the study of physics; and (c)
relate well to others, developed by the study of ethics.
Put more generally, we would say that on the side of the
intersubjective world we share, we hope, first, for individual
and collective self-expression, and thus, we work to secure a
24 Young (1990, Chap. 2) describes five “faces” of oppression: exploita-

tion, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and
violence.
culture based on reason.25 We hope, second, for individual

1 and collective self-development of a kind that will sustain us
and also sustain the world we live in, and thus, we work to
secure a productive, sustainable economy and environ-
ment. And we hope, third, for individual and collective self-
determination, and thus, we work for a just and democratic
society. These, it seems to us, are the three most crucial ele-
ments of ‘a world worth living in’.
Education as an Initiation into Practices
Following Smeyers and Burbules (2006), Kemmis et al.

(2014) argue that education is an initiation into practices. In
relation to the good life for humankind, we think that educa-
tion is an initiation into the kinds of practices characteristic
of the good life for humankind, namely, practices that enact
and secure (1) a culture based on reason, (2) a productive
and sustainable economy and environment and (3) a just and
democratic society. If this is so, then, we believe, education
must be an initiation into the sayings, doings and relatings
that make those practices possible: (1) forms of understanding
(or sayings) that support and secure a culture based on rea-
son, (2) modes of action (or doings) that support and secure
a productive and sustainable economy and environment and
(3) ways of relating to one another and the world (or relatings)
that support and secure a just and democratic society.
A definition of Based on these views, Kemmis et al. (2014, p. 26) gave
education this definition of education:
» Education, properly speaking, is the process by which
children, young people and adults are initiated into forms of
understanding, modes of action and ways of relating to one
another and the world that foster (respectively) individual
and collective self-expression, individual and collective
self-development, and individual and collective self-
determination, and that are, in these senses, oriented towards
the good for each person and the good for humankind.
25 By ‘reason’ here, we do not mean a narrow rationalistic view of

knowledge, but also the reason of the heart. As Pascal (1623–1662)
put it (Pensées, 1670/2013, §iv, 277), “The heart has its reasons,
which reason does not know”. On this view, we should include
reasonableness and reason giving as part of what is meant by ‘a
culture based on reason’.
19 1
In this discussion of the double purpose of education, we Three dimensions
have focused on three kinds of knowledge into which people of knowledge; three
are initiated: forms of understanding, modes of action, and dimensions of social life
ways of relating to one another and the world. We have also
focused on three realms of social life: culture (constructed in
language), the economy and the environment (constructed
of arrangements in the physical and material world), and the
social and political life of a society (constructed in social and
political relationships). It seems to us that other established
educational and social theories identify similar ‘dimensions’
in conceptualising the kinds of things learned, for exam-
ple, or key features of social life. We do not claim, of course,
that they conceptualise them in the way we do. But there are
similarities.
On the side of the individual person, Bloom (1956) and
his colleagues constructed ‘Bloom’s taxonomy’ that classified
knowledge into (a) the cognitive, (b) the psychomotor and (c)
the affective. In ancient times, the Greek philosophers made
a parallel classification: according to Hadot (1995), ancient
Greek philosophy aimed to teach people a (philosophical)
way of life, in which they would (a) think and speak well, (b)
act well in the material world and (c) relate well to others. To
learn to do these things, they therefore studied, respectively,
the three parts of ancient philosophy: (a) dialectics or logic,
(b) physics and (c) ethics.
Similarly, on the side of the intersubjective world we
share, social theorists have sometimes identified social
forms that seem to parallel the kinds of domains identified
by Bloom and his colleagues, and the ancient philosophers.
Bourdieu (1990, 1998), for example, speaks of (a) cultural
and symbolic fields, (b) the economic field and (c) the social
field. Habermas (1972) speaks of the social media26 of (a)
language, (b) work and (c) power.
Earlier, we described ‘three domains of intersubjectivity’:
semantic space, physical space–time and social space. These
parallel Habermas’s three social media of language, work
and power. They also parallel the kinds of knowledge iden-
tified by Bloom et al.: the cognitive, the psychomotor and
the affective. And they parallel Bourdieu’s views of different
kinds of ‘capitals’ and ‘fields’: the cultural and symbolic, the
economic, and the social.
26 Habermas uses the term ‘media’ to describe the media in which we

encounter and connect with one another—what we have referred
to as ‘intersubjective spaces’: semantic space, physical space–time,
and social space.
. Fig. 1.1 A theory of education
. Figure 1.1 summarises the connections, as we see

them, in a schematic representation that slightly elaborates
our definition of education.
The recursive In . Fig. 1.1, we include an infinity symbol (or lem-
connection between niscate) in the background, representing the connec-
the realm of the tion between the realm of the individual, on the one side,
individual and the and the realm of the social, on the other. We show this in
realm of the social . Fig. 1.2. The infinity symbol in . Fig. 1.2 aims to introduce
to . Fig. 1.1 the groundbreaking insight of Karl Marx (1818–
1883) that is expressed in the third of his Theses on Feuer-
bach (originally published in 1845), part of which is:
» The materialist doctrine that [people] are the products
of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore,
changed [people] will be the products of changed
circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that
it is [people] who make circumstances and that the
educator[s] must [themselves] be educated.
The third thesis on Feuerbach shows us that people make

circumstances, and circumstances make people; people are
educated, and educators must be educated to become educa-
tors. In part, people are the products of the society in which
they find themselves; in part, societies are the products of
the people who have inhabited and now inhabit them. As
an educator, you will need to form your own view about
21 1
. Fig. 1.2 The recursive connection between the individual and the
social
how education forms society, and how society forms edu-

cation. (This book gives you one set of tools to consider the
question.)
The forms of understanding that foster individual and The projects of
collective self-expression, the modes of action that foster education
individual and collective self-development, and the ways of
relating to others and the world that foster individual and
collective self-determination can be thought of as projects
or ends of education, expressed at a very general level. Our
definition of education does not yet specify any particu-
lar content appropriate to achieving these ends. The ends
included in the definition can, however, be used in two ways:
positively, to build a curriculum, for example, and negatively
(or critically), to critique existing educational practices, for
example.
Positively, these ends for education can be used to iden-
tify things that might be worth learning or teaching. We
might ask, for example, whether learning mathematics can
help young people to express themselves more clearly in the
world in their interactions with others in a culture based on
reason, and/or develop their capacities to act more produc-
tively and sustainably in a shared economy and in the envi-
ronment, and/or develop their capacities to relate to others
and the world in ways characteristic of a just and democratic
society. A discipline like mathematics has been an object for
contemplation since antiquity, and so we might find ready
agreement that mathematics education contributes to these
ends.
To address the issue more concretely, however, we might An example:
put to work the notion that education is an initiation into mathematics education
practices (Kemmis et al. 2014, see especially Chap. 5). We
have said that practices are composed of sayings, doings and
relatings that hang together in a project; if we then take the
positive view of the ends of education, we might consider

1 what particular projects we want people (all or some) to be
able to enact in our society, and what sayings, doings and
relatings hang together in these projects.
If we ask this latter question specifically about mathematics
education, for example, we might think less about the existing
conceptual content of the mathematics curriculum and more
about what people might need to use mathematics for in the
world—the kinds of mathematical practices that are needed in
the world. And so we might focus less on the tradition of what
mathematicians have taught about mathematics (though we
still need excellent mathematicians more than ever in human
history) and more about mathematics in life—not only about
the poetry of the language of mathematics, or the art of those
skilled in mathematics, or the rich complexities of the ways
people relate to one another through mathematics, but rather
about how these things hang together in the many different
mathematical projects and practices needed for practical life
in all sorts of activities and occupations. Indeed, we might ask
mathematics educators to develop a ‘natural history’ of math-
ematical practices, to discover them in all of their diversity
in all sorts of general and specialised ecological niches in our
cultures, economies and environments, and communities and
societies. And, as some mathematics educators have already
done (Burton 1999; Jorgensen and Zevenbergen 2011; Zeven-
bergen and Zevenbergen 2004), we might work back from this
natural history towards mathematical curricula at every level,
to ensure that people are equipped to participate in the various
kinds of mathematical practices useful to them in their own
lives and in the life of their communities and societies.
Once we have done this, and in relation to each of the
mathematical practices we want to teach, we will need to
teach the sayings and doings and relatings that hang together
in the project of that practice—a practice like paying for
purchases, for example, or a practice like navigating a satel-
lite. Following Wittgenstein (1958, §151, §17927), Kemmis
et al. (2014) suggest that people are initiated into practices
by coming to know how to go on in the practice and that
learners are frequently stirred in (2014, p. 52) to practices
by teachers. On this view, then, teachers and others work-
ing with them might want to make a mathematics curricu-
27 The symbol ‘§’ followed by a number indicates the ‘paragraphs’ or

propositions that make up Wittgenstein’s book The Philosophical
Investigations.
Some Distinctions: Education, Schooling, Training …
23 1
lum in the form of a curriculum of practices, which is to say,
to teach students how to inhabit the general and specialised
niches different mathematics practices occupy in the world
by enacting the practices appropriate to those niches.
Kemmis et al. (2014, Chap. 3) indicate that when stu-
dents learn a new practice like a mathematical practices (like
dividing a cake into equal parts), they learn two things: (1)
the substantive practice (doing the division) and (2) the
learning practice (including, for example, following a teach-
er’s instructions, sharing items between members in small
groups, forming small groups in the classroom) (see also
Kemmis et al. 2017, pp. 54–57). A curriculum of practices,
then, includes both these kinds of practices: the practices to
be learned and the practices by which students learn them.
Some Distinctions: Education, Schooling,

Training, Socialisation and Indoctrination
Education is conventionally distinguished from ‘training’, Education versus

‘socialisation’ and ‘indoctrination’. Training is mostly thought training, socialisation
of in terms of inculcating skills or competencies, and in and indoctrination
terms of coming to do things that are already known and
established—rather than as going beyond the performance
of those competencies. In fact, of course, there is a blurry
boundary between the training that allows one to perform
a skill and the knowledge about how and when to apply
the skill or to modify and extend it. Socialisation is mostly
thought of in terms of the acquisition of the knowledge,
norms and modes of behaviour we acquire merely by partici-
pating in social life, rather than developing modes of ration-
ality that allow us to go beyond what is customary in those
modes of life. Finally, indoctrination is generally regarded as
the inculcation of narrow, biased, false or irrational knowl-
edge and beliefs, different from education that directs us
towards what is rational and supported by good reasons and
good reasoning.
So: on the basis of these distinctions, we take the view
that education is something more than training—it involves
knowing as well as doing; it is something more than sociali-
sation—it involves a capacity to reason beyond the knowl-
edge and values we acquire just by participating in social
life, and it is more than indoctrination because it involves a
capacity to reason through what is narrow, biased, false or
irrational, towards what is true and reasonable.
Education versus People have been heard to give this advice: ‘Don’t let
1 schooling your schooling interfere with your education’. Education is
very different from schooling. Schooling is the formal, insti-
tutional process that most people in the developed world
pass through—not only in schools, but also in preschools
and vocational education and training institutes and uni-
versities—to name the obvious ones. Being ‘schooled’ does
not guarantee that a person will get an education. Indeed,
we should contemplate the possibilities that schooling can
sometimes be non-educational and sometimes even anti-
educational.
Three critical Using our definition of education, we can frame three
questions: education or critical questions about particular everyday activities in
schooling? schooling:
1. Does the activity initiate people into forms of under-
standing that foster individual and collective self-
expression: the capacity to understand our world and to
think and speak well? Does it model and help to secure
a culture based on reason in the classroom, the school
and the community beyond?
2. Does the activity initiate people into modes of action
that foster individual and collective self-development:
the capacities to do the things we need to survive and
thrive as biological beings and as people and communi-
ties, and to act well in the material and natural world,
and in the economic life of the local and global com-
munities? Does it model and help to secure a productive
economy and a sustainable world in the classroom, the
school and the community beyond?
3. Does the activity initiate people into ways of relating
to others and to the world that foster individual and
collective self-determination, that is, democratic self-
determination: the capacities to relate well to others and
the world as social and political beings committed to
democracy, justice, care and compassion, for example?
Does it model and help to secure a just and democratic
society in the classroom, the school and the community
beyond?
The field of Education Studies interrogates the ways we do

education—and schooling—by asking difficult questions like
these.
The pursuit of truth and reasonableness, productiveness
and sustainability, and democracy and justice, as ends or
projects of education, is sometimes thought to be ‘idealistic’
and therefore unrealistic. We disagree. In practice, these are
Some Distinctions: Education, Schooling, Training …
25 1
not just positive commitments; they also imply a negative
or critical program of discovering whether actual states of
affairs are the opposite of truth and reasonableness, produc-
tiveness and sustainability, and justice and democracy, and,
if they are, attempting to overcome what prevents them from
being those things. It is not just a question of being for ‘truth’,
for example, but being committed to finding out whether
what we believe is actually false or irrational or illusory or
insincere or self-deluded or contradictory or unreasoned.
For example, the belief in racial superiority, characteristic of
many empires, turns out not to be true: it is a false idea. Sim-
ilarly, it is not just a question of being for what is ‘productive
and sustainable’, but being committed to finding out whether
what seems productive and sustainable in fact turns out to
be wasteful or destructive or harmful or unsustainable. For
example, some of our longstanding practices of industry and
agriculture have turned out to be unsustainable. And again:
it is not just a question of being for what is ‘fair’, but being
committed to finding out whether what seemed fair actu-
ally turns out to be illegitimate, exclusively self-interested,
socially destructive, exclusionary or violent. At the time of
British settlement of Australia, for example, the doctrine of
‘Terra Nullius’ (the doctrine that the land was not owned by
Aboriginal people since they had no system of land tenure
recognisable to the settlers) turned out to be illegitimate and
unjust—it turned out that the land that came to be known
as ‘Australia,’ claimed for the Crown by the British, was not
land belonging to no one; it was owned by Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander peoples in a way that was different from
British conceptions of ‘ownership’.
An education aims to equip people to be critical in the Education as an
sense that they are committed both to finding such nega- initiation into thinking
tives (the various opposites of truth and reasonableness, pro- critically
ductiveness and sustainability, and justice and democracy)
and then acting to overcome these negatives. Education as
a practice, and as a profession, embodies a commitment to
building a better world for the generations that follow us.
This is especially the task for public education (sometimes
called ‘state education’); it is the task of building an educated
public. A commitment to public education is a commitment
to initiating people into forms of understanding, modes of
action, and ways of relating to others and the world that fos-
ter the good for each person and, at the same time, the good
for humankind.
This is the ‘sweet spot’ of education. Teachers find this
‘sweet spot’ from time to time, at a variety of scales from the
moment-to-moment unfolding of classroom life through to

1 the succession of generations through a school. Listen to a
first grade teacher talk about a child who has just learned to
read—that is the kind of ‘sweet spot’ that gets many people
into the profession and makes them glad that they are in it.
Or hear the passion in the voice of the teacher who has com-
municated the beauty of Euclidean geometry or cell biology
or a musical composition to students. Or the pleasure of a
teacher whose students are expressing the towering politi-
cal convictions of the young, arguing about issues of the day
and engaging in active citizenship. Or hear the mixture of
pride and humility in the voice of a teacher who has just met
a former pupil who said that the teacher had in some way
changed the course of the student’s life. Such ‘sweet spots’ are
the incalculable rewards of practising education as a profes-
sion. They are moments in which we see the teacher as an
educator, as one who is engaged in the formation of persons
and the formation of a society that has some notion (con-
tested though it may be) of the good for humankind. It is in
order to be teachers like this, we believe, that most people
enter the education profession—to be like the teachers who
inspired and shaped them. They do not enter the profession
merely to ‘school’ people.
For such reasons, we have cause to honour teachers who
educated us. We have not forgotten them. Perhaps we also
have the magnanimity to forgive the ones who only schooled
us; some of those we have forgotten.
Education: building These days, we almost never hear about the contributions
societies as well as of teachers and schools to building societies—and particular
persons ways of living. We hear much more about what schooling
is meant to contribute to ‘the knowledge economy’—build-
ing the economy. In former times, by contrast, people were
much more acutely aware of how they and their societies
had been formed by certain kinds of education—for exam-
ple, the progressive education championed by John Dewey
in the first half of the twentieth century (for example, Dewey
1916) that aimed to form active and informed citizens for
a democracy, or the politicising and democratising educa-
tion of Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed that gal-
vanised huge and successful literacy campaigns in Central
and South America, Africa and India. It is a very great pity
that, as adults, individually and collectively, we do not have
greater self-awareness about how we have been formed by
our education, and by our schooling, not just as individuals
who happen to have passed through schools, and not just as
persons whose identities have been shaped by our education,
A Thesis: The Double Purpose of Education
27 1
but also as members of communities who now encounter
one another in forms of social life foreshadowed and foretold
in the curricula and pedagogies of our schools and universi-
ties, for example.
Schools came into existence to serve educational pur-
poses for individuals and for societies, and they evolved
through history to serve different kinds of purposes for indi-
viduals and for societies. The institution of schooling has
been transformed many times in the hope that it could help
form better individuals and better societies. And, as with
every great idea or institution, the notions of ‘better indi-
viduals’ and ‘better societies’ have always been interpreted
through the eyes of people in a particular historical epoch,
informed by their own traditions, and working within their
own horizons. To understand schooling, then, we may need
to understand something of its history, and something of
how different kinds of schools were formed by the changing
times and circumstances—the historically changing socie-
ties—in which they emerged. To do this, we turn now to a
double history: a history of the institutions of schooling as
they have been shaped and reshaped to nurture and support
different views about the practice of education.
A Thesis: The Double Purpose of Education
In this chapter, we have argued that education has a double

purpose: the formation of individuals and the formation of
societies. As we saw in our definition of education, it forms
individuals—the good for each person—by forming their
forms of understanding, modes of action and ways of relat-
ing to others and the world. Simultaneously, education aims
to form societies—the good for humankind—by forming
shared language that will foster a culture based on reason,
shared ways of working that foster a productive and sus-
tainable economy and environment, and shared solidarity
among people to foster a just and democratic society.
We also saw how these educational aspirations were
formed in antiquity, in Aristotle’s views about education
outlined in his Nicomachean Ethics and in his Politics. We
argued that they are still relevant today. Any contemporary
theory regarding the education of persons (the individual
good for each person) still requires a complementary the-
ory of politics (the collective good for humankind), so that,
together, they shape the formation of individuals so everyone
can live well in a world worth living in. In 7 Chap. 2, we will
explore how ideas about education have changed in the two

1 millennia since the philosophical schools of ancient Greece,
to see how different ideas about education have been realised
in changing institutions—changing ideas of what schools
should be like.
Finally, we saw that education is an initiation, not just
into knowledge, but into practices—the ways people live
in the world. We will explore this topic in more detail in
7 Chap. 4.
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© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018

Education has a double purpose.1 On the one hand, it aims

1 Throughout this book, we have used footnotes to elaborate par-

5 A technical division of labour is a division between tasks (like

education for the twenty-first century.8 Against this view,

8 For the classical postmodernist challenge to the idea of progress

10 On the ill effects of the excesses of neo-liberalism, see Sennett

wise and prudent judgements about what they should do at

Education in Antiquity: Aristotle

16 Bartlett and Collins (2011, p. 318) translate politeia as ‘regime’;

Politics (trans. Sinclair 1962), favouring a democratic society

18 By contrast, Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), for example, took

of action (for example, the distinction between the technical

For Aristotle, then, contemplation gives rise to opinions,

22 These distinctions are further elaborated and developed in Book VI

» For of this alone even a god is deprived:

On this view, the aristocratic ancient Greeks strove to be the

For Aristotle, education is a crucial part of this ‘scientific

23 As indicated in the last chapter in the last book of the Nicomachean

The constitutional community Aristotle has in mind is not Athenian democracy:

idea of what it meant to live in a polis—a city-state ruled

Aristotle’s account of the moral and intellectual virtues in the

Like Charles Taylor, then, we reject the notion that we can

individual human beings. Our existence as persons and our

24 Young (1990, Chap. 2) describes five “faces” of oppression: exploita-

culture based on reason.25 We hope, second, for individual

Education as an Initiation into Practices

Following Smeyers and Burbules (2006), Kemmis et al.

25 By ‘reason’ here, we do not mean a narrow rationalistic view of

26 Habermas uses the term ‘media’ to describe the media in which we

. Fig. 1.1 A theory of education

. Figure 1.1 summarises the connections, as we see

The third thesis on Feuerbach shows us that people make

how education forms society, and how society forms edu-

positive view of the ends of education, we might consider

27 The symbol ‘§’ followed by a number indicates the ‘paragraphs’ or

Some Distinctions: Education, Schooling,

Education is conventionally distinguished from ‘training’, Education versus

The field of Education Studies interrogates the ways we do

moment-to-moment unfolding of classroom life through to

A Thesis: The Double Purpose of Education

In this chapter, we have argued that education has a double

explore how ideas about education have changed in the two

Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago, IL: The University of

Woodward, W. H. (1904). Desiderius Erasmus concerning the aim and

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