Why still education?

This paper focuses on a few simple questions that fundamentally challenge the idea of education, as well as its modern realization. The suggestion is that, within the undividedly accepted educational strategy of the West, there are still uninspected costs and smuggled dilemmas. They then burden the contemporary disputes over education at a lower level of generality: general or vocational, culturally determined or universal, standardized or deregulated, uniform or plural, privileged or available to all, elite or ?open? education, and so on. We believe that such thorough clearing up of conceptual field would point to those presumed purposes, functions, and outcomes of education which make its investments seem constantly unsatisfactory, and education itself appears chronically in crisis.