The ethical education of future citizens was the first and steadiest meaning ascribed to the educational action - at least since this ceased to be a private practice exercised in a spontaneous and dispersed fashion to make way for specific social institutions and specialized actions. Since its beginning, the extended debate about the ends and procedures of education was essentially motivated by questions in which ethics and politics were strongly intertwined. Grown into an explicit and reflexive social activity, education became an instrument to construct a new polis - accomplishing the political undertaking through the ethical education of future citizens. Moreover, this task must be associated with the invention of the notion of school, understood in its broader sense - either as an institution devoted to a kind of education consigned to specialists and that goes beyond the strictly domestic sphere, or in the special sense it acquired in modernity when the public school system is assigned almost full responsibility for education, which used to be consigned to the citizens as a whole.
Ethics; Public education; Public school; Citizenship