Introduction

One of the frequent criticisms that is made of education is that it is too narrowly focused on skills, capacities, and the transference of knowledge that can be used in the workplace. This is usually attributed to the dominance of economic rationalism and neoliberalism. There is justification for this, since the language of the market has entered education and, as a consequence, corrupted understanding of the aims of education. A broad definition of education as upbringing has the merit of being able to accommodate a variety of different aims of education. More importantly, however, both the large number of aims and the broad definition point to the role that different element of the community play in education. Padraig Hogan, in his discussion of intrinsic and extrinsic aims of education, is criticised for making the distinction too sharp, since it is argued that there will be overlap between these aims.