Flourishing as an Aim of Education: Some Challenges

One need not hold a religious view to think that as well as equipping pupils with knowledge and skills, education might seek to give or enable them to form some conception of the meaning or significance of life. Conjoined with notable failures to provide a credible alternative to traditional forms of moral education such considerations have contributed to a movement from the deontological (rules and principles), to the instrumentally prudential (clarity and coherence), to the axiological (values), to the aretaic (character and virtue), and most recently to the teleological seeing the role of virtue as relating instrumentally and constitutively to leading a flourishing life. This approach faces significant challenges, however, which need to be addressed before it can hope to be adopted across a range of educational contexts but particularly within schooling. These relate to the form and content of statements concerning human flourishing. The appeal to flourishing as an educational aim is difficult first and most abstractly because flourishing is a more logically complex and metaphysically substantial notion than is sometimes recognised; and second, because in the context of contested ends and purposes appeals to flourishing face some of the same challenges as do older educational schemes intended to prepare for life and for death.