Thus there arises the fundamental dilemma of education. To define in advance an end result and then to seek by all possible means to achieve it is to be held too narrowing, too repressive, too authoritarian. But if, on the other hand, there is no end in view, educational activity is confused and incoherent. Its various parts and successive phases do not add up to anything. Without a definition of the end there is no test by which means can be (...) selected, and no standard by which practice can be criticized and improved. (shrink)

The quality of our lives depends to a great degree on the sorts of people who inhabit them. There are very different sorts, and there are good reasons for preferring some sorts to others, and for doing what one can to be of one sort rather than another. These are truisms too seldom explored in moral philosophy.

It is surprising that contemporary philosophers of education have paid so little attention to the question of what kinds of things can and cannot be taught. That this question is central in the history of the subject, beginning with the Meno, need not, I think, be argued. Neither should it be necessary to argue that it is logically prior to such large questions as those concerning the aims of education, or the definition of the teacher, or the relationship between democracy (...) and education, or the place of education in nature, or, more modestly, in culture. How one could begin to answer such questions without first exploring the boundary between the teachable and the non-teachable is far from clear. (shrink)