To think of education as an initiation into practices is part of many ‘traditional’ views of education. This initiation can be conceptualized without endorsing the conservative and reproductive conception of what it entails when attention is given to our ways of learning and enacting practices and how this is intertwined with our self and sense of identity, and our relations and ways of interacting with other people. This also avoids the radical social constructivist idea that all practices are arbitrary and groundless. This view implies that there is a way we identify with particular practices, that they transform the self, but also that they give at the same time opportunities. Furthermore, that the narrativization of a practice shapes one’s relation to it, which sheds light on how some of the predominant narratives today (performativity, individualism, estrangement from tradition, etc.) are threatening the rich and robust significance of certain practices, but also on how a practice gives moral weight and how it becomes an object of excellence/perfectibility. Finally, it entails that there are narratives which can give rise to a more critical/reflective relation to a practice (‘education about a practice’ and not just ‘education into a practice’) and which can revitalize practices and promote a more liberating relation to them. The language of experts (particularly when focusing on parental skills/training) is used to exemplify how this discourse has distorting effects for the practice of child rearing: it prioritizes a means end reasoning and erodes the rich sense of education. An antidote is offered by bringing language and practices back at the level of the (Cavellian) ‘ordinary’, to withstand the sceptical tendency underlying the craving for certainty nowadays.