Before I begin, I wish to thank Megan Laverty for what I see as a gracious paper, one that opens up some difficult questions for education while allowing room for hope to pursue the task in which all of us are engaged in our daily lives. Laverty has undertaken here a kind of instruction of sorts. She states the importance of what she calls instructional scepticism for the field of philosophy of education, and for the practice of education more generally. Her instruction entails a commitment to the project of education through the acknowledgement of its paradoxes and its impossibilities. Casting a Deweyan eye over the educational landscape, Laverty concentrates on the active, social nature of what it is we do in schools and classrooms. Her view builds upon an initial tracing of conceptual differences within the field of philosophy of education, based on the ‘call to be practical’ and in so doing refuses to reassert the very tired divisions between analytic and continental philosophy and between modern rationalism and poststructuralism. Terms, which to my mind, are practically useless and theoretically flawed, as they only serve to stifle thought as opposed to opening up the ground for new questioning. Laverty instead redefines the call to be practical in such a way as ‘to make explicit the ethical, aesthetic, and existential dimensions of education’