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Chapter 3 34 3.1 I NTRODUCTION In philosophy of education, human flourishing has been defended as an ideal or overarching aim of education, by some even as the ideal aim of education. 1 These authors argue that education, and school curricula, should pay more attention to striving for a flourishing life, and the sort of goods that are claimed to be constitutive of or to contribute to a flourishing life. Some claim that the traditional curriculum should incorporate ways of equipping children to lead flourishing lives, 2 while others propose to change the traditional curriculum to better fulfil the ideal aim of equipping children to lead flourishing lives. 3 Wolbert, De Ruyter and Schinkel have argued that every conception of flourishing meets the following five criteria: (1) human flourishing is regarded as intrinsically worthwhile; (2) flourishing is described in some way as the actualisation of human potential; (2a) flourishing is about a whole life; (2b) it is a dynamic state; and (2c) flourishing presupposes that there are objective goods. 4 According to Wolbert et al. such conceptual clarification contributes to the discussion if and how flourishing should be argued for as an ideal aim of education and how such an ideal can be implemented in educational policy and practices. But we think there is another pressing matter that needs to be addressed. Apart from clarification of the concept of flourishing, we think it is important to ask what kind of theory educational theory on flourishing usually/generally is, and what kind of theory it should be. While parents, teachers and those who are being educated inevitably will encounter the complexity of “real life”, and all the good and/or bad luck that comes with it, in other words live in a real and an actual world, educational theory can, in principle, avoid the limitations of reality altogether, or mend/bend reality in a way that the theorist deems appropriate. 5 For this reason it has to be well considered by theorists in what way educational theory theorises about, and relates itself to the nonideal. It must be made clear in advance that we are not simply addressing the inevitable gap between theory and practice in this paper, but that we are addressing issues within or about theory, i.e. we are discussing in what way educational theories can be construed, and in what way they should be. The article therefore starts with definitions of ideal theory, nonideal theory and idealisations taken from literature on theories of justice. Secondly we analyse and evaluate examples of recent 1 E.g. White 2007, 2011; Reiss and White 2013; Brighouse 2006, 2008; Kristjánsson 2017; De Ruyter 2004, 2007, 2012, 2015. 2 E.g. Brighouse 2008. 3 E.g. Reiss and White 2013. 4 Wolbert, De Ruyter and Schinkel 2015. 5 Throughout this paper, ‘real’ and ‘realistic’ refer to a world or a practice that can exist in reality, whereas with ‘actual’ a particular reality in a certain time and place is meant, e.g. current schools in The Netherlands.