ABSTRACT
John White emerged to prominence in educational research as a member of a remarkable group of philosophers of education whom Professor Richard Peters recruited at University of London's Institute of Education during the late 1960s. White is a prolific writer whose work has ranged widely from educational issues at the edges of philosophy of mind and aesthetics to educational policy disputes in British newspapers. He argues that autonomy is necessary to individual wellbeing because without it children will either be mired in conflicts of desire or they will look to arbitrary authority to resolve the conflict for them. Education and the Good Life revisits the leading ideas of White's earlier book, addressing them in ways that reflect the influence of some of the most notable work in moral and political philosophy during the 1980s, especially Joseph Raz's The Morality of Freedom and Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.
