ABSTRACT
The most general aim of education is a personality characteristic that we can call "life competence". This is an extremely complex network of physical and psychic dispositions containing inherited species-specific components and learning-dependent culture-specific ones. Moral education was embedded in a social life-world oriented to shared ideals, which were regarded as self-evident and had no alternatives in peoples' personal life-worlds. The customary sanction-supported collective ideals of a legal-political, religious-worldview and moral nature were consistent and, without a great expenditure of educational assistance, educands could internalize them to create a personal valuation-compass. Social life, social learning and education occurred on the foundation of shared normative-orientation goods. The right to live according to one's own belief-convictions and to educate one's children is a basic right protected by constitutional and international human rights pacts, even if the parents' belief contents may seem strange to others.
