From the Greeks to Nietzsche it has been a commonplace that human life is contingent, and subject to the arbitrariness of chance. Freud and Darwin gave new force to this commonplace, though each became interpreted as proposing the unvarying laws of depth psychology and evolution. Yet both the politics and philosophy of education in our time proceed as if things were otherwise. School effectiveness research seeks to eliminate chance altogether by making schools 'totally reliable organisations', and the market is often held by social Darwinists to be the source of laws, for education as for other goods and services, that cannot be evaded. In the name of accountability and transparency regimes of quality assurance attempt to eliminate the accidental and contingent. Meanwhile our embodied and vulnerable human nature is largely ignored in the western philosophy of education of the later twentieth century. That philosophy's characteristic emphases on autonomy and rationality bring dangers along with their proper foregrounding of the distinctively educational. For instance, they seem to reinstate the transparent Cartesian ego: liberal notions of autonomy and choice are readily coopted by the neo-liberalism that requires the individuated consumer to sell its products to. More than this, however, liberal philosophy of education threatens to neglect the demands of the body and the significance of desire and to leave the self disencumbered and attenuated. A philosophy of education that thus fails to embrace human finitude cannot guide human flourishing and personal growth. It is for reasons such as these that many writers regarded as 'postmodern' attempt to reinstate the contingent and the particular - the local, the marginalised, the petits recits. In this paper however I attempt a different line of thought from within the liberal tradition itself. I draw on recent work, eg by Tomasi (Liberalism Beyond Justice, 2001), to argue that liberalism is not, as often claimed, neutral on different conceptions of the good life. It often has unintended cultural effects, for instance when the liberal position that there are different religions, none necessarily better than any other, may weaken the religious beliefs and sense of identity of a cultural group whose faith insists it is the one and only true faith and commits its adherents to proselytising on its behalf. The further task for the liberal society in such cases is to help its citizens cope when public and political values impinge on the ethical background culture. The crucial question for education thus becomes to teach young citizens to handle the conflict not simply between different personal commitments but between a set of state-sponsored values on the one hand and (so to speak) minority or even individual cultural ones on the other. This, I suggest, is the problem of doing justice to the contingency and fragility of our commitments and of our world while at the same time attempting to build lasting and even universal liberal political institutions. Thus liberalism and human finitude are connected, as they were for the Greeks who invented democracy and tragedy - the art form above all that shows us our vulnerability to chance - at much the same time.