ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some contributions to the debate around what education might be for as a way of identifying some wider and yet still ‘educational’ uses of dialogue. Socialisation has to do with ‘inserting individuals into existing ways of doing and being’; helping children to become part of ‘particular social, cultural and political “orders”’; it plays an important role in the continuation of culture and tradition. Subjectification, which might be thought of as the opposite of socialisation, might explicitly encourage autonomy and independence in thought and deed. Michael Oakeshott is in favour of ‘liberal’ education; liberal because ‘it is liberated from the distracting needs of contingent wants’. He offers us the metaphor of education as an adventure through the history of human learning and culture and on into the future. Michael Oakeshott was fundamentally a conservative thinker; the extent to which he would agree with Biesta and the Cambridge Primary Review is debatable.
