ABSTRACT
Educational aims are personality ideals. They specify the characteristics that young people should acquire and their educators should further: knowledge and ability, attitudes, convictions, virtues and proficiencies. Any reasonable person can see that educational aims are indispensable for educational practice. The purpose of all education is to help educands acquire personality characteristics that will enable them to live independently and with a sense of social responsibility. To supplement formal educational aims, we need substantive educational aims: specific contents of knowledge and ability, religious faith, moral convictions, political attitudes, and aesthetic preferences, etc. The essential educational aims are supra-individual societal or collective personality ideals that are not at the discretion of individuals—neither of educators nor of educands. Obviously there are also individual personality ideals and educational aims. Complete educational aims must be formulated in type concepts that express, using specifying attributes that belong to the species concept, what type of competence, virtue, knowledge or ability they call for.
