Education for Individual Fulfilment as Social: Grappling with Obstructions to Growth

In placing education at the centre, as The Main Enterprise of the World, Philip Kitcher has undertaken a monumental task. He has come to the field of philosophy of education captivated by the importance of its substantive preoccupations for the advancement of democratic aims. Accordingly, his book argues that the most salient obstruction to preparing citizens who will contribute to society is the seeming irreconcilability of the demands of industry, on the one hand, and of students’ personal growth, on the other. In spite of his desire to accommodate diverse accounts of the human good, and his recognition of the formative role of culture, broadly conceived, there are strains in his account of human fulfilment deriving from the disjunction of the self and others. It is not evident, on his Deweyan onto-epistemology, that there is adequate attention to the imprint on an individual and on the beliefs they come to form of proximal social groups. The nature of the balance between ‘in group’ and ‘out group’ influences, between those that are near and those that are far, can profoundly affect the plausibility of Kitcher’s account of a socially based sense of fulfilment.