ABSTRACT
Flourishing has re-emerged recently as an account of the ideal aim of education, for instance in works by a number of contemporary educational philosophers. This chapter aims at explicating and critically reviewing this new paradigm by subjecting it to philosophical and educational scrutiny. Moreover, against those who refuse to take Aristotle as their starting point, I show how contemporary accounts of flourishing are largely compatible with Aristotle's account or can be amplified by drawing more explicitly on it. Throughout I ask, at regular junctures, about the specific role of teachers in developing flourishing students. In the first section, I make some initial comments about the recent educational flourishing accounts and discuss some of their characteristics. The second and third sections explore two proposed preconditions of flourishing, external necessities and students' sense of meaning or purpose. The fourth section then addresses the objections of paternalism and elitism, which are often directed at eudaimonic accounts of well-being in general and at Aristotle-inspired accounts of flourishing in education in particular. The fifth section then explores a recently suggested distinction between ideal and non-ideal theories of flourishing, and it criticises this distinction for being conceptually ambiguous about the dividing line between the ‘realistically ideal’ and the ‘non-ideal’.
