The purpose of my paper is to discuss the socio-cultural and ethical reference points for constituting the aims of education in the late-modern societies. I argue with Herman Nohl that education has its specific ontological status in relation to other phenomena of life and social institutions. Recognizing the radical changes in the moral sphere of education I will focuse on describing the ideological shifts in educational governance drawing on the nation state centered tradition of modernity. In my philosophical analysis my intention is to overcome the dilemmas present in the communitarian and liberal theories ethics. At the same time I will defend education, teaching and teacher education against pure economic, commercial and technological tendencies for making them plainly the means of utility. The core question is how to educate moral subjects in the frame of globalized and still more market-driven context of the nation state. The conflicting trends in the moral sphere of the nation state force us to question the premises of postmodern education and teacher education. There are a lot of possibilities to orient toward the new kind of "glocal" and multi-cultural humanity with a new kind of sense of globalized citizenship. There are also risks of fully-marketization, fundamentalism, segregation and increasing inequality - the risks of "the winner takes all"-society.Lockian liberalism made the satisfaction of pleasure and happiness into values worth attaining, but in a profoundly inter-subjective and ethical sense: one might not violate the rights of others nor aspire to happiness at the cost of others. The liberal subject is the result of a long political education, and as such an important and essential creation, but our problem is that out of it has arisen a image of the human being based on hybris ? we can discern rights but not boundaries and responsibilities. In the present age of a consumer-centred, competition-driven economy and value-subjectivism, the concentration on pleasure has become detached from its moral foundation and turned into a goal in itself ? individuality and the attainment of individual pleasure have become the driving forces behind the economized reality. For this reason, a value-subjective interpretation of liberalism is insensitive to the ecological and socio-economic challenges of late modern society, and it is thus unsuitable as the basis of moral education. Communitarianism, with its clear challenge of quality difference to value-subjectivism, is itself problematic in the pluralistic social reality of our times. From the point of view of the social prerequisites for education, however, the communitarian horizon of the moral whole (common basic values) is not, pedagogically and sociologically, the only alternative for developing into a moral subject. One may ask whether it is not possible to examine moral communities without the assumption of strong common values as forms of life that permit a rich life for individuals without however determining its direction in terms of its contents? The communitarian ethic of common basic values clearly does not embrace increasingly multicultural, pluralistic worlds of living; it fails to take into account the already existing variety of identities. The greatest challenge for the creation of a value perspective for education stems from the radical re-interpretation of the human (corporal) self with her or his foundational ecological ties. How can we find the basis for a good life and education without collective certainties and metaphysical principles? The basic questions for educational re-orientation are: how can we accept pleasure as the source of happiness and strive to create a constructive frameworks for directing our pleasures and at the same time put up barriers to consumer hedonism?1) a meta-analysis of international and Finnish studies of changes in the moral perspective of the nation state; 2) a philosophical and ideological critique (cf. Foucault) of philosophico-ideological movements that direct the moral horizon of the nation state and the constitution of a moral subject from the perspective of the present age, and in particular a critical assessment of communitarianism and liberalism as bases for moral education.1) The presentation will consist of an ideological critique of the goals of education within different moral horizons: the constitution of the subject under (a) communitarian ethics, (b) liberalism and (c) neo-liberalist control.2) The historically aware emphasis of the presentation is on the present age: the interpretation of the formation of a moral subject in the face of the moral challenges and the instrumentalist pressures of our time. 3) The aim of the presentation is to elucidate the conditions for, and the barriers to, the development of a moral subject in the late modern nation state and to explicate the tasks and ethical responsibilities of education generally and of general elementary instruction and teacher education in particular in an age of global challenges.Apple, M. 2001, Educating the "Right" Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality. 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