What are the effects of the standardising policies on education system within daily educational practice? What changes in the mind of educators? How can philosophy of education contribute to illuminating this question, how can it speak alongside a sociological or psychological approach? These are the questions animating my paper that meanwhile I hope could involve a discussion with the present researchers. The questions are really very close to each other because a theoretical inquiry on what a proper educational action could be and the reflection on the reasons that let an educator act towards a pupil, can represent at the same time a complex of arguments that can be confronted with the prompted political request of standardisation itself and with all the implicit or explicit ideas that comply this public proposal. In other words, the philosophical speculation on the concept of educational action can reveal itself as more allied to educational practice, more purely involved and interested in, than political or economical initiatives.
I'd like to present in this paper some results of my theoretical research on educational action in order to confront my ideas and meanwhile I argue that these outcomes pose the educational action itself in the condition of challenging, in practice, the exigences of standardisation. In fact, I'd like to show how some characteristics of a genuine educational practice are in an antithetical position respect standardisation, especially examining the problematic of temporality. This means that the concept of time in educational action has a different nature compared with the one of political and social pressures for quick changes. This peculiar form of temporality in educational action is, I claim, a reflection of conceiving of practice as involving phronesis and epimeleia, concepts coming from ancient Greek philosophy. In fact, I define a genuine educational action as a bipolar entity in which two dimensions of time are contemplated (time as kairos and time as kronos) instead of a one-dimensional temporality of standardisation.The bidimensional educational action is a consequence of a line of reasoning starting from anthropological premises, or, I can say, the anthropological anchoring of the educational discourse, distant from for example a competitive-economical justification of educational processes. Epimeleia and phronesis, it is argued, let the educator act starting from the individuality of a pupil, with his name and surname, not from impersonal collective initiatives.
In addition to this, it is important ask ourselves if political and economical objectives have to be really in their 'nature' inevitably distant from the educational premises, or if we can discuss about a problem of overwhelming (not taking in account) the research world devoted to education actuated by the world devoted to politics and economy. For example, the standardisation in a certain way obliges to focus on particular objectified outcomes, this risks flattening education, reducing it to a sort of dimidiated learning, if we obviously agree with the idea that education is bigger than learning, concerning also interior changes of the personality, moral development and attribution of a sense to life. If we agree also that education corresponds to the acquisition of such superior mental capacities as divergent and critical thinking, creativity and deliberation towards problematic unexpected situations. The bipolarity of educational action has to reflect the intrinsic bipolarity of the aims of education, involving both learning but also personal transformation. Unidimensional educational actions, due to a standardising culture promoted by political establishment, I think is really a general decline of education in schools and in other cultural institutions. It is the victory of a pure functional mentality where human beings become instruments.

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