Education has rarely enjoyed the standing of an acknowledged practice in its own right, as distinct from a subordinate enterprise effectively controlled by state, church, or other institutionalised interests. Yet its ancestry as a practice in Western civilisations – in pre-Platonic Greece – reveals, though in different ways, strong indications of such acknowledged standing. Consider, for instance, the schools of the sophists on the one hand and in the educational work of Socrates on the other. The first part of this paper reviews some contemporary consequences of the long history of subjugation of education in Europe to the demands of successive generations of powers-that-be. Among the most significant of these consequences is a widespread inability to distinguish practices that are genuinely educational from those that are not. Education is all too often understood as whatever is authorised to go on in schools and colleges. Democratic societies repeatedly overlook the fact that such authorisation nowadays uses funding policies to harness the minds and efforts of new generations of learners, and teachers, to governmental priorities. The mechanisms of influence are more sophisticated than the explicit proselytisms of earlier eras, but the subordination of educational practice to the will of the powers-that-be is scarcely less decisive. Successive waves of educational reform internationally in recent decades have instituted a newly coercive order of things. Much of educational research has acquiesced in the demands of this new order, and this has beclouded the coherence required of an educational thinking that is equal to elucidating and r sustaining education as a robust practice in its own right. The venturesome nature of education as a practice in its own right is then examined, highlighting features that are conducive to building healthy environments of learning: e.g. the freedom and safety to question; the necessity to listen to and engage with the unfamiliar; the obligation to co-operate with fellow-learners; the requirement to cultivate a range of fluencies as one’s emergent identity encounters new landscapes. The second part of the paper explores the unity necessary to educational thinking; a unity providing coherence to a range of complementary enquiries that illuminate the undertakings of teaching and learning. The overall goal here is to make such undertakings more lucid in thought and more fruitful in practice. We suggest that such unity includes at least three features. These features, examined in the remainder of the paper, are: pedagogical focus, participatory reflection, ethical equilibrium.

The philosophical thinking informing this paper owes much to sources like Gadamer, Wittgenstein (later), Dewey. This thinking seeks to elucidate a situated, yet an objectively persuasive conception of human understanding. A conception of this kind is less the preserve of one or other method, but is more critically alert to the inescapable presence and influence of presuppositions in all instances of human understanding. Such a thinking is crucial, we argue, to the coherence, and the conduct, of defensible teaching and learning. Crucial, that is, to education as a publicly accountable practice; but also a practice with its own integrity, worthy in turn of public trust and support. The epistemological character of the paper's arguments could roughly be described as a critcal-hermeneutic one.

Rather than offering watertight conclusions, the paper seeks to provide some suggestive ideas, elucidating for the kinds of thinking that inform education as a coherent practice in its own right, including its research dimensions. The tests of evidence to which such suggestions might be subject are less those of a scientific discipline or theory than they are the demands of educational practice itself. Such suggestions seek illuminate the distinctiveness, the promise and the defensibility of educational practice in the widest diversity of circumstances. In other words, their status is that of candidates for the commitments and actions of educational practitioners Practitioners here include not only teachers, but also educational leaders and educational researchers, working in ever-more pluralist settings.