What and what for? Theorizing ontology and instrumentality of education. Introduction to the Special Issue

In this introductory paper, I am situating the problems addressed in this special issue of Policy Futures in Education not only in relation to the current critique of instrumentality in education, but also against a historical and theoretical background (Rousseau, Herbart and Dewey) where the construction of instrumental apparatuses is related to how education is understood itself. In other words, the question is if, and how instrumentality and ontology-social and educational-can be theorized in their mutual relations. This relation was the theme of a symposium held in 2017 in Gdansk which initiated our work on this collection of papers. In the final part of the paper I briefly relate to how particular authors contributing to this issue have construed their varied responses to this question.