Description
If the purpose of education is to see that students flourish, schools ought to concern themselves explicitly with the question of what it means to flourish. I argue that our current schools fail to ensure that all students flourish because the ontological assumption in our schools presupposes that an individual's flourishing comes at the expense of others. I offer an alternative, ecological conception of flourishing, insisting that due to our ontological interdependence, a person cannot be said to flourish if she does so in isolation and at the expense of others. The Ideal School that I propose assumes this ontological criterion for flourishing that is contingent on interdependent relations rather than atomistic, hierarchical, or exploitative relations, and as such, it necessitates both egalitarian resource distribution and philosophical dialogue as irreplaceable components in the school.
