ABSTRACT
The first kind of moral life was acquired through living with people who have habitually behaved in a certain manner. The second form of moral life requires 'training in an ideology'. Children need to be taught moral ideals and principles and to learn how to apply them to concrete situations. Michael Oakeshott's strong preference is for societies in which the first form of moral life predominates, but where there is also an element of the second. The issues about the moral life of society and its implications for education addressed by Oakeshott were revisited almost exactly fifty years later by Chantal Delsol in Icarus Fallen, published in France as Le souci contemporain in 1996. The implications for education are for the formal curriculum, wherever opportunities for 'moral education' show themselves, the informal curriculum and the whole structure and ethos of the school as a community.
