Education as initiation to a “Form of life”: Conceptual investigation and education theory

Abstract

According to L. Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians, there is a set of intuitions, propositions and practices that forms the community’s bounds of sense. In this paper I discuss how fruitful this idea can be for education theory. I argue that, although the idea of an existing everyday framework can help explain how education works, any efforts to defend our current worldview as binding of our understanding boils down to conservatism. Following this view, comes the assertion that many problems posed today by philosophers and scientists are bogus and should be dismissed on the ground that they question our ordinary framework. Hence prescribing an even stronger version of conservatism that promotes quietism over intellectual challenge.