While the institutional infrastructure for educational theory and philosophy remains rather fragile around the world, many scholars nonetheless find opportunities for conducting theoretical and philosophical investigations and for publishing their findings. Specialist journals are in good health (submission, downloads), and the same holds for specialist books. The picture is even more promising if one looks beyond the community of self-identified educational philosophers and theorists, as there is a still-growing body of educational literature that engages enthusiastically with theories and philosophies. If in the 1990s most research used ‘a socio-cultural approach,’ the past two decades have witnessed a proliferation of new theories, including posthumanism, new materialism, affect studies and actor-network theory, to name the most prominent. New ‘code words’ have emerged in statements such as that all education is a matter of becoming, or that everything in education is embodied, relational or entangled. The problem I will discuss in my contribution is that there is a danger that such statements and the theories upon which they rely do not really get to the educational ‘heart’ of the matter. This is partly because, without a specific context, many claims about, for example, embodiment, relationality, materiality, or entanglement are actually undecidable and become a form of ‘bad metaphysics’ by just declaring what reality is really like. But the main problem is that in much of this work the educational question remains poorly articulated. Many of the newer theories seem to be about growth, development or learning viewed in terms of ‘interactions’ between human beings and their human or non-human or post-human environments. While such information may be useful, the point is that the educator’s question – and thus the educational question – is never about these ‘processes,’ but about what educators are supposed to do or refrain from doing as educators. While the educator’s question – and thus the educator’s perspective – should be the central concern for educational theory, it turns out to be quite difficult to keep this particular into focus. As a result, the enthusiastic uptake of theory and philosophy in contemporary educational research runs the risk of undermining rather than enhancing the development of forms of theory and theorising that matter educationally. In my contribution, I will analyse what is going on, why and how the educational question is often lacking, and what might be done to turn such scholarship more closely to what matters and should matter educationally.

**Selection** - Biesta, G. (2011). Disciplines and Theory in the Academic Study of Education: A Comparative Analysis of the Anglo-American and Continental Construction of the Field. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 19(2), 175–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2011.582255 - Biesta, G. (2013). On the Idea of Educational Theory. In B. J. Irby, G. Brown, R. Lara-Alecio, & S. Jackson (Eds.), The Handbook of Educational Theories (pp. 5–16). IAP. - Biesta, G. (2022). World-Centred Education: A View for the Present. Routledge. - Sæverot, H. (2013). On the Need to Ask Educational Questions About Education: An Interview with Gert Biesta. Policy Futures in Education, 11(2), 175–184. https://doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2013.11.2.175 - Sæverot, H. (2021). How May Education be Organized to Safeguard its Autonomy? Educational Theory, 71(1), 113–128. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12470 - Siegel, S. T., & Biesta, G. (2021). The Problem of Educational Theory. Policy Futures in Education, (Online first). https://doi.org/10.1177/14782103211032087 - Yosef-Hassidim, D., & Baldacchino, J. (2021). Education's autonomy as a utopian polysemic possibility: Challeng-es and a path forward. Educational Theory, 71(1), 35–51. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12466