Abstract

This paper claims that liberal moral education is predicated on an inadequate conception of the roots of moral disposition and agency. It advances a view of modernity in which social and material conditions, whilst not comprising an ‘iron cage’, nevertheless give momentum to some trends in social (and individual) development, and place others at a discount. Thus a moral education which seeks to assure an open future through individual cognitive emancipation risks exacerbating processes inimical to its aims. This is illustrated with reference to the socio-economic conditions of contemporary liberal capitalism and to broader features of modernity. Implications are sketched for the emancipatory aims of education, the role of the school in moral development, the scope of education theory, and the development of critical social theory and social practices.