Wisdom and Care as the Two Faces of Educational Action

The central aim of this paper is to explore a kind of rationality that seeks to do justice to educational practice: to our understanding of its complexities and to its actual conduct. The enquiry begins with a review of the limits of standardising procedures, including their inbuilt technicist bias, which are increasingly dominant in educational policymaking internationally. Secondly, the classical Aristotelian idea of practical rationality is invoked (with the central virtue phronesis) because it offers a genuine moral point of view in conceiving educational activity, even if it is acknowledged that it is insufficient in describing the complexity of educational activity itself. Thirdly, the argument then proceeds by introducing two bi-dimensional concepts; concepts, it is argued, that can give a fuller account of and a more adequate rationale for educational action. The first bi-dimensional concept draws on Aristotelian argument to elucidate a notion of educational action (not just moral action) with the couple epimeleia-phronesis (care-wisdom). The second bi-dimensional concept recasts our understanding of temporality in education as an interplay of Kronos and Kairos—of chronological time and kairological time.