EDUCAŢIE, AUTONOMIE ŞI IDEOLOGIE: O RECONSTITUIRE A FILOSOFIEI EDUCAŢIEI A LUI MICHAEL OAKESHOTT
Education, Autonomy and Ideology. A Reconstruction of Michael Oakeshott’s Philosophy of Education

Summary/Abstract: Michael Oakeshott’s ideas on education raise significant challenges regarding the coherence of liberal ideals, illustrating a tension between, on one hand, the values of cultivating human autonomy, creativity and moral personality and, on the other, the limited capacity of social and political institutions to develop these attributes. At the same time, they are couched in terms failing to address ethical issues increasingly important for the current literature on education. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct an implicit philosophy of education present in Oakeshott’s writings and defend its core principles against the objection that they disregard legitimate concerns for social justice. As his views on education cannot be separated from his criticism of rationalism as the dominant intellectual style of modern Europe, the argument advanced in the last part of the paper is that providing a comprehensive outlook on liberal education (as genuine “pursuit of learning”, as well as social good with positional features) would, for Oakeshott, have run counter to his credo of rejecting perfectionist and self-contained theoretical models.

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