Flourishing-focused education
Doret de Ruyter, Professor of Education, University of Humanistic Studies

Please join us for a seminar led by Doret de Ruyter, Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Humanistic Studies. The event is hybrid, so we are looking forward to welcoming some of you in person in Bristol and others online.

Flourishing-focused education

The word flourishing is increasingly used in academic and popular texts. A probable reason for its success is that we all intuitively grasp what flourishing means. However, by being a ‘hurray word’, it can easily lose its distinctive meaning, whereas this is important for our reflections on (moral) education.

The lecture begins with a concise overview of ideas about flourishing and a defence of my conception of it.

In the second part I defend the idea that although we’re educating human beings, we shouldn’t confine the aim of education to human flourishing, for this suggests an anthropocentric perspective. This leads to the question whose flourishing (or the flourishing of what) should be included in people’s actions and therefore be an element of the aim of education.

In the final part I look into the idea of taking responsibility for flourishing – one’s own and that of others. This is a fine human quality that should be promoted in education, but it needs to be a realistic expectation of what individuals and groups of people can do and should be able to refrain from doing.

Doret de Ruyter is professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Her research interests circle around education for flourishing, ideals in education, moral and citizenship education and professional ethics.

For a list of publications, please see here.

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