Philosophy is a product of Western culture focused reflectively, or introspectively on first-person experience of the moral individual and what it is, and what it is like, being as such in any world, and as being this person in this world. Since human life on earth, as we know it, is functionally impossible outside of a group—we are herd animals—education is the transformation we undergo that makes us capable of living autonomously in nature and in society; for society to serve a role of protection and opportunity for persons, individual and collective, “socialization”, or education in social practices, has a practical role of promoting a society this is coherent as an ordering practice and is willed to exist on the basis of sufficient consent. Education clearly serves a utilitarian purpose, but only moral persons can assure its integrity in, and through, time. Group coherence is constantly under pressure from the outside, or, more exactly, what is perceived to be the case for ageement and action, and it is under pressure from subjective questions regarding the value to our person of submitting to conditions of collective life.

For most of human history, education for most people has meant learning to accept conditions of collective life out of fear (very real) of being excluded from the organic life-supporting group. Moral persons must consent to conforming to a framework of action, but such consent can be coerced; and such “coercion” may occur by pressure form others (real or perceived), or from being self-imposed on the basis of interest and reasons.

Education has changed with the emergence of the direct involvement of mass opinion in political governance, due principally to consensual arbitration of opinion as facilitated by the creation of knowledge and information as made possible by expanded means of communication. Consensus arbitration of public opinion extended to most persons in society has greatly expanded the incentives for specialized skills acquisition and has essentially turned classic representational systems of governance, based on a proxy system of delegating our powers of moral consent, on their heads. Public opinion today is clearly the tail that wags the dog. In time, public institutions will evolve so as to give a legitimate role to public opinion in the exercise of collective power. However, already, moral consent for collective life no longer depends on former forcing practices based upon zero-sum choices regulated by incentives of social exclusion and inclusion because the “group” we depend upon for protection and opportunity is no longer, for a growing number of people, a line-of-sight community, so our consent to collective life has become much more a matter of managing our best interests and our personal set of social principles.